This paper reviews the quantitative methods used at selected central banks to stress testing credit risk, focusing in particular on the methods used to link macroeconomic drivers of stress with bank specific measures of credit risk (macro stress test). Stress testing credit risk is an essential...

This paper tests the role of different banks� liquidity funding structures in explaining the bank failures that occurred in the United States between 2007 and 2009. The results highlight that funding is indeed a significant factor in explaining banks� probability of default. By...

The volume collects the essays presented at the 15th Workshop on Public Finance organised by Banca d'Italia in Perugia from 4 to 6 April 2013. The workshop focused on the link between fiscal policy and macroeconomic imbalances and comprised four sessions. The first session concentrated on the...

Assessing the global economic outlook is a fundamentally important task of international financial institutions, governments and central banks. In this paper we focus on the consequences of the rapid growth of emerging markets for monitoring and forecasting the global outlook. Our main results...

In this paper we explore the performance of bridge and factor models in forecasting quarterly aggregates in the very short-term subject to a pre-selection of monthly indicators. Starting from a large information set, we select a subset of targeted predictors using data reduction techniques as in...

Recent empirical literature shows that key macro variables such as GDP and productivity display long memory dynamics. For DSGE models, we propose a �Generalized� Kalman Filter to deal effectively with this problem: our method connects to and innovates upon data-filtering techniques...

It has increasingly become standard practice to supplement point macroeconomic forecasts with an appraisal of the degree of uncertainty and the prevailing direction of risks. Several alternative approaches have been proposed in the literature to compute the probability distribution of...

The world recession triggered by the financial crisis has impacted with extraordinary violence on economic activity in Italy.What has been the contribution of the various channels through which the crisis was transmitted to the Italian economy? What have been the effects stemming from the...

The prominent role assigned to money by the ECB has been the subject of an intense debate because of the declining predictive power of the monetary aggregate M3 for inflation in recent years. This paper reassesses the information content of monetary analysis for future inflation using dynamic...

This paper documents the existence of a significant forecast error on crude oil futures, particularly evident since the mid-1990s, which is negative on average and displays a non-trivial cyclical component (risk premium). We show that the forecast error on oil futures could have been explained...