The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the need for timely and granular information to assess the state of the economy in real time. Weekly and daily indices have been constructed using higher frequency data to address this need. Yet the seasonal and calendar adjustment of the underlying time...

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...

We develop a partial adjustment model in order to estimate the factors contributing to banks' internal target capital ratio, lending policy and holding of securities. The model is estimated on a panel of listed euro area banks and country specific macrovariables. Firstly, banks' internal target...

This paper assesses the usefulness of private credit variables and other macrofinancial and banking sector indicators for the setting of Basel III/CRD IV countercyclical capital buffers (CCBs) in a multivariate early warning model framework, using data for 23 EU Members States from 1982 Q2 to...

The paper develops an early-warning model for predicting vulnerabilities leading to distress in European banks using both bank and country-level data. As outright bank failures have been rare in Europe, the paper introduces a novel dataset that complements bankruptcies and defaults with state...

Based on a sample of EU listed banks, we estimate the sensitivity of banks' marginal cost of debt and analyse the potential impact of the post-crisis regulatory package. We build synthetic estimates of risk in banks' books and the macroeconomic environment and argue that regulatory changes alter...

Hamilton (2017) criticises the Hodrick and Prescott (1981, 1997) filter (HP filter) because of three drawbacks (i. spurious cycles, ii. end-of-sample bias, iii. ad hoc assumptions regarding the smoothing parameter) and proposes a regression filter as an alternative. I demonstrate that Hamilton's...

The Basel III framework advises considering a reference indicator at the country level to guide the setting of the countercyclical capital buffer: the credit-to-GDP gap. In this paper, I provide empirical evidence suggesting that the credit-to-GDP gap is subject to spurious medium-term cycles,...

This paper studies the impact of cyclical systemic risk on future bank profitability for a large representative panel of EU banks between 2005 and 2017. Using linear local projections we show that high current levels of cyclical systemic risk predict large drops in the average bank-level return...