In a contribution prepared for the Athens Symposium on “Banking Union, Monetary Policy and Economic Growth”, Otmar Issing describes forward guidance by central banks as the culmination of the idea of guiding expectations by pure communication. In practice, he argues, forward guidance has...

We construct a Financial Conditions Index (FCI) for Greece as a surveillance tool to quantify the degree of the stress in the financial sector. We use principal component analysis to capture the information content of several financial indicators through a single index. We also construct an...

This paper proposes a stochastic volatility model to measure sovereign financial distress. It examines howkey European sovereign credit default swap (CDS) spreads affect each other; specifically, the paperanalyses the volatility structure of Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal....