The sovereign debt crisis in the euro area has increased the interest in early warning indicators, with the aim to indicate the build up of fiscal stress early on and to facilitate crisis prevention by a timely counteraction of fiscal and macroeconomic policies. This paper presents possible...

This paper builds a macro-prudential tool designed to assess whether the banking sector is adequately prepared to orderly withstand losses resulting from normal or stressed macroeconomic and micro-economic scenarios. The link between the banking sector and the real sector is established via the...

This paper studies the relative pricing of euro area sovereign CDS and the underlying government bonds. Our sample comprises weekly CDS and bond spreads of ten euro area countries for the period from January 2006 to June 2010. We first compare the determinants of CDS spreads and bond spreads and...

We use realised variances and co-variances based on intraday data from Eurozone sovereign bond market to measure the dependence structure of eurozone sovereign yields. Our analysis focuses on the impact of news, obtained from the Eurointelligence newsflash, on the dependence structure. More news...

This paper proposes a general statistical framework for systemic financial stress indices which measure the severity of financial crises on a continuous scale. Several index designs from the financial stress and systemic risk literature can be represented as special cases. We introduce an...

This paper develops a general equilibrium model to analyze the link between financial imbalances and financial crises. The model features an interbank market subject to frictions and where two equilibria may (co-)exist. The normal times equilibrium is characterized by a deep market with highly...

This paper studies the relationship between the size of the banking sector's refinancing needs vis-à-vis the central bank and auction rates in its open market operations in times of financial market stress. In a theoretical model, it is found that marginal rates at central bank auctions may...

This paper studies the relative pricing of euro area sovereign CDS and the underlying government bonds. Our sample comprises weekly CDS and bond spreads of ten euro area countries for the period from January 2006 to June 2010. We first compare the determinants of CDS spreads and bond spreads and...