During the ongoing financial crisis the analysis of similar historical crises has gained more and more attention among economic researchers and forecasters. Existing studies, however, do not tackle the immense heterogeneity that is present in cross-country samples in a formal and consistent way....

Macro-stress testing studies often rely on rather short sample periods due to the limited availability of banking data. They may fail to appropriately account for the cyclicality in the interaction between the banking system and macroeconomic developments. In this paper we use a newly...

In this paper, we use survey data to analyze the rationality of professional macroeconomic forecasts. We analyze both individual forecasts and average forecasts. We provide evidence on the properties of forecasts for all the G7-counties and four different macroeconomic variables. Furthermore, we...

We analyze the international transmission of financial stress and its effects on economic activity. We construct country specific monthly financial stress indexes (FSI) using dynamic factor models from 1970 until 2012 for 20 countries. We show that there is a strong co-movement of the FSI during...