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....

This paper empirically explores how fiscal policy (represented by increases in government spending) has asymmetric effects on economic activity at different levels of real interest rates. It suggests that the effect of fiscal policy depends on the level of real rates, since the Ricardian effect...

A number of industrialized countries have recently offered inflation-indexed bonds. Some members of another group of countries that had earlier adopted more comprehensive indexation in response to high inflation have taken steps to reduce the scope of indexation in their economies. This paper...

Option prices provide valuable information on market expectations. This paper attempts to extract market expectations, as conveyed by an implied risk-neutral probability distribution, from option prices for the dollar-euro exchange rate. Returns` volatilities are inferred from observed and...

This paper proposes a framework for the surveillance of financial institutions' derivatives activities. The designed framework builds on information likely to be collected by financial market regulators for supervisory purposes, and/or information collected by market participants for the purpose...

We investigate the link between gender inequality in financial inclusion and income inequality, with three contributions to the recent literature. First, using a micro-dataset covering 146,000 individuals in over 140 countries, we construct novel, synthetic indices of the intensity of financial...

In the early 1870s, the global monetary system transitioned from bimetallism—a regime in which gold and silver currencies were tied at quasi-fixed exhange ratios—to the gold standard that was characterized by the use of (only) gold as the main currency metal by the largest and most advanced...

Potential output-in the sense of the GDP level or path an economy can sustain over the medium term-is a crucial benchmark for policymakers. However, it is difficult to estimate when financial 'booms and busts' are driving the real economy. This paper uses a simple multivariate filtering approach...

This paper develops a structural macroeconometric model of the world economy,disaggregated into forty national economies. This panel dynamic stochastic generalequilibrium model features a range of nominal and real rigidities, extensivemacrofinancial linkages, and diverse spillover transmission...

The paper introduces 'system priors', their use in Bayesian analysis of econometric time series, and provides a simple and illustrative application. System priors were devised by Andrle and Benes (2013) as a tool to incorporate prior knowledge into an economic model. Unlike priors about...