The veterans disability compensation (VDC) program, which provides a monthly stipend to disabled veterans, is the third largest American disability insurance program. Since the late 1990s, VDC growth has been driven primarily by an increase in claims from Vietnam veterans, raising concerns about...

We explore whether modelling parameter time variation improves the point, interval and density forecasts of nine major exchange rates vis-a-vis the US dollar over the period 1976-2015. We find that modelling parameter time variation is needed for an accurate calibration of forecast confidence...

This paper contributes to the literature on early warning indicators by applying a Bayesian model averaging approach. Our analysis, based on Austrian data, is carried out in two steps: First, we construct a quarterly financial stress index (AFSI) quantifying the level of stress in the Austrian...

We use a Diamond/Dybvig-based model with two banks operating in separate regions connected by a common asset market in which banks and sophisticated depositors invest. We study the effect of a potential run (crisis) and subsequent fire sales on the asset price in both the crisis and no-crisis...

This paper considers factor estimation from heterogenous data, where some of the variables are noisy and only weakly informative for the factors. To identify the irrelevant variables, we search for zero rows in the loadings matrix of the factor model. To sharply separate these irrelevant...

A growing literature stresses the importance of the “global financial cycle”, a common global movement in asset prices and credit conditions, for emerging market economies (EMEs). It is argued that one of the key drivers of this global cycle is monetary policy in the U.S., which is...

Motivated by the build-up of shadow bank leverage prior to the financial crisis of 2007-2008, I develop a nonlinear macroeconomic model featuring excessive leverage accumulation and endogenous financial crises to capture the observed dynamics and to quantify the build-up of financial fragility....