Can the upturns and downturns in financial variables serve as early warning indicators of banking crises? Using data from 59 advanced and emerging economies, we show that financial overheating can be detected in real time. Equity prices and output gap are the best leading indicators in advanced...

The paper examines the determinants of employment growth, drawing on data available across a sample of Caribbean countries. To that end, the paper analyzes estimates of the employment-output elasticity and the response of employment growth to major sources of labor market determinants, in the...

Monthly economic indicators support policy analysis of current economic developments and forecasting. This paper presents an overview of the data and statistical requirements to develop those indicators taking into account resource constraints that LIC typically face. We review statistical...

This paper constructs a coincident indicator for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) area business cycle. The resulting coincident indicator provides a reliable measure of the GCC business cycle; over the last decade, the GCC coincident index and the real GDP growth have moved closely together....

This paper constructs new business cycle indices for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico based on common dynamic factors extracted from a comprehensive set of sectoral output, external data, and fiscal and financial variables spanning over a century. The constructed indices are used to derive a...

This study proposes a data-based algorithm to select a subset of indicators from a large data set with a focus on forecasting recessions. The algorithm selects leading indicators of recessions based on the forecast encompassing principle and combines the forecasts. An application to U.S. data...

This paper provides an analytical overview of the most widely used capital flow datasets. The paper is written as a guide for academics who embark on empirical research projects and for policymakers who need timely information on capital flow developments to inform their decisions. We address...

We construct sentiment indices for 20 countries from 1980 to 2019. Relying on computational text analysis, we capture specific language like 'fear', 'risk', 'hedging', 'opinion', and, 'crisis', as well as 'positive' and 'negative' sentiments, in news articles from the Financial Times. We assess...

This paper evaluates three models for predicting currency crises that were proposed before 1997. The idea is to answer the question: if we had been using these models in late 1996, how well armed would we have been to predict the Asian crisis? The results are mixed but somewhat encouraging. One...