This study finds that equity returns in the banking sector in the wake of the Great Recession and the European sovereign debt crisis have been driven mainly by weak growth prospects and heightened sovereign risk and to a lesser extent, by deteriorating funding conditions and investor sentiment....

The equity premium follows a pronounced v-shape pattern around the beginning of recessions. It sharply drops into negative territory just before business cycle peaks and then strongly recovers as the recession unfolds. Recessions are preceded by an inverted yield curve. Thus probit models using...

We extend the canonical income process with persistent and transitory risk to shock distributions with left-skewness and excess kurtosis, to which we refer as higher-order risk. We estimate our extended income process by GMM for household data from the United States. We find countercyclical...

We study whether the accuracy of real-time estimates of the output gap produced by the OECD has improved over time by examining a panel dataset on real-time output gap revisions for 15 countries from 1991 Q1 - 2005 Q4. We use a simple panel data regression and a state space model, with common...

Based on the decline in real GDP growth, many economists now believe that the 'Great Recession', the output contraction the world experienced in 2008–09, is the deepest global economic contraction since the Great Depression. But as real-time real GDP data are typically revised, we investigate...

For the timely detection of business-cycle turning points we suggest to use mediumsized linear systems (subset VARs with automated zero restrictions) to forecast the relevant underlying variables, and to derive the probability of the turning point from the forecast density as the probability...