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This chapter studies the dynamic responses of the conditional quantiles and their applications in macroeconomics and finance. The authors build a multi-equation autoregressive conditional quantile model and propose a new construction of quantile impulse response functions (QIRFs). The tool set of QIRFs provides detailed distributional evolution of an outcome variable to economic shocks. The authors show the left tail of economic activity is the most responsive to monetary policy and financial shocks. The impacts of the shocks on Growth-at-Risk (the 5% quantile of economic activity) during the Global Financial Crisis are assessed. The authors also examine how the economy responds to a hypothetical financial distress scenario.

Oil market VAR models have become the standard tool for understanding the evolution of the real price of oil and its impact on the macro economy. As this literature has expanded at a rapid pace, it has become increasingly difficult for mainstream economists to understand the differences between alternative oil market models, let alone the basis for the sometimes divergent conclusions reached in the literature. The purpose of this survey is to provide a guide to this literature. Our focus is on the econometric foundations of the analysis of oil market models with special attention to the identifying assumptions and methods of inference.

Ng (2002), and Lim and McAleer (2003) explained that if the national economies are not converging, or if the responses of national economies to random shocks are asymmetric, the cost of premature monetary integration would be high. This chapter investigates the feasibility of adopting a single currency for ASEAN-5 countries. The research uses the Kalman Filter procedure to test the economic convergence among ASEAN-5 countries, relative to Japan and the US. In addition, the symmetry of underlying structural shocks is also examined by applying a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model. The research findings showed that Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand (ASEAN-3) appear to be relatively suitable for forming an Optimum Currency Area. However, the results did not show significance evidence whether the Japanese Yen or the US dollar will be a suitable currency for the ASEAN-3 countries to adopt commonly.

In 2020, household incomes were severely hit by the lockdowns imposed across the world in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data from the last available wave of the euro-area harmonized Household Finance and Consumption Survey for 2016, this chapter documents European households’ financial resilience to this shock, based on pre-shock balance sheets, potential exposure to COVID-19, and in the absence of government interventions. The results highlight that there are large and similar shares of the population across European countries that are likely to suffer from the economic fallout of containment measures – albeit through different channels.

In this paper, we examine the concept of “vulnerability” within the context of income mobility of the poor. We test for the dynamics of vulnerable households in the UK using waves 1–12 of the British Household Panel Survey and find that, of three different types of risks that we test for, household-specific shocks and economy-wide aggregate shocks have the greatest impact on consumption, in comparison to shocks to the income stream.

A state space representation of a linearized DSGE model implies a VAR in terms of observable variables. The model is said be non-invertible if there exists no linear rotation of the VAR innovations which can recover the economic shocks. Non-invertibility arises when the observed variables fail to perfectly reveal the state variables of the model. The imperfect observation of the state drives a wedge between the VAR innovations and the deep shocks, potentially invalidating conclusions drawn from structural impulse response analysis in the VAR. The principal contribution of this chapter is to show that non-invertibility should not be thought of as an “either/or” proposition – even when a model has a non-invertibility, the wedge between VAR innovations and economic shocks may be small, and structural VARs may nonetheless perform reliably. As an increasingly popular example, so-called “news shocks” generate foresight about changes in future fundamentals – such as productivity, taxes, or government spending – and lead to an unassailable missing state variable problem and hence non-invertible VAR representations. Simulation evidence from a medium scale DSGE model augmented with news shocks about future productivity reveals that structural VAR methods often perform well in practice, in spite of a known non-invertibility. Impulse responses obtained from VARs closely correspond to the theoretical responses from the model, and the estimated VAR responses are successful in discriminating between alternative, nested specifications of the underlying DSGE model. Since the non-invertibility problem is, at its core, one of missing information, conditioning on more information, for example through factor augmented VARs, is shown to either ameliorate or eliminate invertibility problems altogether.

Despite recent advances, neither organizational studies nor the scholarship on economic resilience has systematically addressed how the ecologies of organizations that populate local economies can serve as infrastructures for responding proactively to economic shocks. Using county-level data, this study analyzes relationships between the prevalence of organizational alternatives to shareholder value-oriented (SVO) corporations within a particular locality and its unemployment levels during and after the Great Recession. The results support the hypothesis that the presence of such alternative organizations can enhance the capacities of local economies to resist and recover from recession shocks. Cooperative, municipal, and community-based enterprises, research universities, and nonprofits more generally were associated with greater resistance to the recession shock and stronger recoveries – specifically, lower surges in unemployment rates from 2007 to 2010 and greater reductions in unemployment rates from 2010 to 2016. By contrast, SVO corporations were associated with greater surges in unemployment and perhaps weaker recoveries. Providing a proof of concept, this study opens up new lines of inquiry for organizational studies by linking organizational ecologies to the promotion of collective efficacy and a more broadly shared prosperity in economic life.

In this chapter, using a combination of long-run and sign restrictions to identify aggregate monetary and productivity factors, I find that the monetary factor is responsible for long swings in nominal variables but has little effect on fluctuations in output, real wage, or labor input growth. The productivity factor in addition to increasing output growth and real wage growth in the short and long run, also results in increases in labor input and decreases in prices, but the quantitative effect of the productivity factor on labor input is relatively small. These results are robust to the number of factors included in the model and to alternative priors about the short-run effects of the monetary factor, and to the inclusion of oil prices. Oil prices, in fact, appear to be largely driven by the other aggregate factors.