We propose a novel framework to analyze how policy-makers can manage risks to the median projection and risks specific to the tail of gross domestic product (GDP) growth. By combining a quantile regression of GDP growth with a vector autoregression, we show that monetary and macroprudential...

This paper investigates the importance of U.S. macroeconomic news in driving low-frequency fluctuations in the term structure of interest rates in Canada, Sweden and the United Kingdom. We follow two complementary approaches: First, we apply a regression-based framework that aggregates the...

We study the revision properties of the Bank of Canada's staff output gap estimates since the mid-1980s. Our results suggest that the average staff output gap revision has decreased significantly over the past 15 years, in line with recent evidence for the U.S. Alternatively, revisions from...

This paper predicts phases of the financial cycle by using a continuous financial stress measure in a Markov switching framework. The debt service ratio and property market variables signal a transition to a high financial stress regime, while economic sentiment indicators provide signals for a...

This paper quantifies the effects of improving public equity markets on macroeconomic aggregates and welfare. I use an open-economy extension of Angeletos (2007), where entrepreneurs face idiosyncratic productivity risk in privately held firms. They can diversify by investing in publicly traded...

We use narrative evidence along with a novel database of real-time data and forecasts from the Bank of Canada's staff economic projections from 1974 to 2015 to construct a new measure of monetary policy shocks and estimate the effects of monetary policy in Canada. We show that it is crucial to...

This paper introduces a new methodology to date systemic financial stress events in a transparent, objective and reproducible way. The financial cycle is captured by a monthly country-specific financial stress index. Based on a Markov-switching model, high financial stress regimes are...

We incorporate quantile regressions into a structural vector autoregression model to empirically assess how monetary and fiscal policy influence risks around future GDP growth. Using a panel of six developed countries, we find that both policy instruments affect the location of the distribution...

In this paper, I extend the results of Moskowitz and Vissing-Jørgensen (2002) on the returns to entrepreneurial investments in the United States. First, following the authors' methodology I replicate the original findings from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) for the period 1989 - 1998 and...

We develop a finite-sample procedure to test for mean-variance efficiency and spanning without imposing any parametric assumptions on the distribution of model disturbances. In so doing, we provide an exact distribution-free method to test uniform linear restrictions in multivariate linear...