Readme for Ms. No.: RED-15-239R1

Title: Business Cycle Fluctuations and the Distribution of Consumption

Giacomo De Giorgi (University of Geneva, ICREA/MOVE, BGSE, BREAD, CEPR, and IPA)
Luca Gambetti (UAB, and BGSE)

All programs are written and run in Matlab on Windows 7, the data files are in excel. Each set of results requires a computational time below 5 minutes on a standard machine, i.e. Intel i7-2630M CPU @2.8GHz.
Below is a brief description of all the replication files and what they are meant to replicate.

Data
All of the data used in the paper are contained in the 3 excel files below. The data are fully described in the paper (see Section 3, and Appendices A and B).
1. DataGiacomoUpdated2.xlsx
2. Dummies.xlsx
3. SentimentCateg.xlsx


Matlab Codes (in alphabetical order)
We list below the various matlab codes in alphabetical order as aside from the very first programs
1. ReadDataGiacomoLong.m  
2. MakeDataLong.m
3. Prelim.m
There is no natural ordering in the files below.

1. BandVar.m  – Compute the variance decomposition on a frequency band 
2. BC_stats.m – Compute the business cycle statistics of consumption NIPA and CEX
3. cffilter.m – Band pass filter
4. ConsumerUncertainty.m –  Main program to estimate the effects of consumer uncertainty
5. DecileStatistics.m -- Compute the statistics of the deciles of the consumption distribution 
6. DoChiCons.m – Compute the common component of the consumption deciles
7. EducCat.m – Program that estimates the effects on education categories
8. FAVARBootAfterBoot.m – Estimate a FAVAR with Cholesky Identification and bias correction
9. FAVARCholBoot.m –  Estimate a FAVAR with Cholesky Identification  and bootstrap
10. FAVARCholIdent.m ­–  Estimate a FAVAR with Cholesky Identification  
11. FAVARCholImp.m –  Compute the IRF of a FAVAR with Cholesky Identification  
12. FAVARRaw.m –  Estimate the reduced form IRF of a FAVAR 
13. GenerateUncertainty.m –  Creates some variables used in the estimation
14. JuradoPure.m ­–  Main program to estimate the effects of economic uncertainty using Jurado et al identification scheme
15. JuradoUncertainty.m ­–  Main program to estimate the effects of economic uncertainty using a version of Jurado et al. (2015).
16. MainProgReplication.m ­–  Main program to replicate all the results of the paper.
17. MakeDataLong.m ­–  Create data set
18. PolicyUncertainty.m ­–  Main program to estimate the effects of economic policy uncertainty
19. Prelim.m ­–  Preliminary transformations
20. principalcomponents.m ­ –  Compute the principal components
21. ReadDataGiacomoLong.m  ­– Program to read the data 
22. SentProg.m ­–  Main program to estimate the effects on Michigan survey data 
23. Simulation2.m ­ –  Program for simulations 
24. standardize.m  ­–  Stardardize a variable
25. TFPRobustness.m ­–  Main program to estimate the effects of TFP shocks

MATLAB formatted data
Matrices used in the above programs
1. aggu.mat
2. indp.mat
3. mich.mat
4. pol_un.mat
5. urate.mat