About the soundness of the US-cay indicator for predicting international banking crises

This paper shows that a macroeconomically founded predictor of global stock market returns, the short-run variation in the trivariate approximation of the U.S. consumption and aggregate wealth ratio (cay), is a useful indicator of international banking crises for the time period from 1970 to 2008 in- and out-of-sample and for various forecast horizons. It outperforms a real estate based indicator as well as other potential measures of global imbalances on stock markets.