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Extreme weather events are expected to increase with climate change. Such events are detrimental for local economic activity but could also affect countries that are not directly exposed through global agricultural production shortfalls and price surges. Here, estimations for 75 countries show that increases in global agricultural commodity prices caused by harvest or weather disruptions in other regions of the world significantly curtail economic activity. The impact is considerably stronger in advanced countries, despite relatively lower shares of food in household expenditures. Effects are weaker when countries are net exporters of agricultural products, have large agricultural sectors and/or are less integrated in global markets for non-agricultural trade. Once we control for these characteristics, the relationship between the country’s income per capita and the economic repercussions becomes negative. Overall, these findings suggest that the consequences of climate change on advanced countries, particularly through food prices, may be larger than previously thought.Extreme weather events such as heatwaves and droughts are likely to occur more often under climate change. Such events can have an indirect effect on countries through global agricultural markets and food prices; this impact is stronger for higher-income than lower-income countries.

This paper assesses the macroeconomic effects of unconventional monetary policies by estimating a panel vector autoregression (VAR) with monthly data from eight advanced economies over a sample spanning the period since the onset of the global financial crisis. It finds that an exogenous increase in central bank balance sheets at the zero lower bound leads to a temporary rise in economic activity and consumer prices. The estimated output effects turn out to be qualitatively similar to the ones found in the literature on the effects of conventional monetary policy, while the impact on the price level is weaker and less persistent. Individual country results suggest that there are no major differences in the macroeconomic effects of unconventional monetary policies across countries, despite the heterogeneity of the measures that were taken.

Using state-dependent local projections and historical US data, we find that government spending multipliers are considerably larger in periods of private debt overhang. In particular, while multipliers are below or close to one in low private debt states, we find significant crowding-in of private spending in periods of debt overhang, resulting in multipliers that are much larger than one. In high private debt episodes, more government purchases even reduce the ratio of government debt to gross domestic product. These results are robust for the type of shocks, and when we control for the business cycle, financial crises, deleveraging episodes, government debt overhang, and the zero-lower-bound.

This paper uses a simple VAR for the USA and Euro area to analyse the underlying shocks of the early millennium slowdown, i.e. supply, demand, monetary policy and oil price shocks. The results of two identification strategies are compared. One is based on traditional zero restrictions and, as an alternative, an identification scheme based on more recent sign restrictions is proposed. The main conclusion is that the recent slowdown is caused by a combination of several shocks: negative aggregate supply and aggregate spending shocks, the increase of oil prices in 1999, and restrictive monetary policy in 2000. These shocks are more pronounced in the USA than the Euro area. The results are somewhat different depending on the identification strategy. It is illustrated that traditional zero restrictions can have an influence on the estimated impact of certain shocks.

This paper analyses the role of the real exchange rate in a structural vector autoregression framework for the United Kingdom, Euro area, Japan, and Canada vis-á-vis the United States. A new identification strategy is proposed building on sign restrictions. The results are compared to the benchmark conventional approach of Clarida and Gali (1994) based on long-run zero restrictions. Although the restrictions are derived from the same theoretical model, the results are strikingly different. In contrast to the benchmark model, an important role for nominal shocks in explaining real exchange rate fluctuations is found. Hence, the exchange rate can rather be considered as a source of shocks instead of a shock absorber.

SUMMARY There has been a systematic increase in the volatility of the real price of crude oil since 1986, followed by a decline in the volatility of oil production since the early 1990s. We explore reasons for this evolution. We show that a likely explanation of this empirical fact is that both the short‐run price elasticities of oil demand and of oil supply have declined considerably since the second half of the 1980s. This implies that small disturbances on either side of the oil market can generate large price responses without large quantity movements, which helps explain the latest run‐up and subsequent collapse in the price of oil. Our analysis suggests that the variability of oil demand and supply shocks actually has decreased in the more recent past, preventing even larger oil price fluctuations than observed in the data. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We first estimate the effects of a euro area-wide monetary policy change on output growth in eleven industries of seven euro area countries over the period 1980-98. On average the negative effect of an interest rate tightening on output is significantly greater in recessions than in booms. There is, however, considerable cross-industry heterogeneity in both the overall policy effects and the degree of asymmetry across the two business cycle phases. We then explore which industry characteristics can account for this cross-industry heterogeneity. Differences in the overall policy effects can mainly be explained by the durability of the goods produced in the sector. This can be regarded as evidence for the conventional interest rate/cost-of-capital channel. In contrast, differences in the degree of asymmetry of policy effects are related to differences in financial structure, in particular the maturity structure of debt, the coverage ratio, financial leverage and firm size. This suggests that financial accelerator mechanisms can partly explain cross-industry differences in asymmetry.

Using time-varying BVARs, we find a substantial decline in the shortrun price elasticity of oil demand since the mid-1980s. This finding helps explain why an oil production shortfall of the same magnitude is associated with a stronger response of oil prices and more severe macroeconomic consequences over time, while a similar oil price increase is associated with smaller output effects. Oil supply shocks also account for a smaller fraction of real oil price variability in more recent periods, in contrast to oil demand shocks. The overall effects of oil supply disruptions on the US economy have, however, been modest.

We use a model-based identification strategy to estimate the impact of technology shocks on hours worked and employment in the euro area. The sign restrictions applied in the vector autoregression (VAR) analysis are consistent with a large class of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models and are robust to parameter uncertainty. The results are in line with the conventional Real Business Cycle (RBC) interpretation that hours worked rise as a result of a positive technology shock. By comparing the sign restrictions method to the long-run restriction approach of Galí (Quaterly Journal of Economics (1992) 709-38), we show that the results do not depend on the stochastic specification of the hours worked series or the data sample but only on the identification scheme.

We examine the macroeconomic effects of different types of oil shocks and the oil transmission mechanism in the Euro area. A comparison is made with the US and across individual member countries. First, we find that the underlying source of the oil price shift is crucial to determine the repercussions on the economy and the appropriate monetary policy reaction. Second, the transmission mechanism is considerably different compared to the US. In particular, inflationary effects in the US are mainly driven by a strong direct pass-through of rising energy prices and indirect effects of higher production costs. In contrast, Euro area inflation reacts sluggishly and is much more driven by second-round effects of increasing wages. The monetary policy reaction of the ECB to oil shocks is also strikingly different compared to the FED. The inflation objective, relative to the output stabilization objective, appears more important for Euro area monetary authorities than for the FED. Third, there are substantial asymmetries across member countries. These differences are due to different labour market dynamics which are further aggravated by a common monetary policy stance which does not fit all.