This paper constructs risk-free interest rates implicit in index option prices for ten of the major G11 currencies. We compare these rates to the yields of government bonds to provide international estimates of the convenience yield earned by safe assets. Average convenience yields across...

Monetary policymakers and long-term investors would benefit greatly from a measure of underlying inflation that uses all relevant information, is available in real time, and forecasts inflation better than traditional underlying inflation measures such as core inflation measures. This paper...

Using the panel component of the Michigan Survey of Consumers, we show that individuals, in particular women and ethnic minorities, are highly heterogeneous in their expectations of inflation. We estimate a model of inflation expectations based on learning from experience that also allows for...

We reassess the predictability of U.S. recessions at horizons from three months to two years ahead for a large number of previously proposed leading-indicator variables. We employ an efficient probit estimator for partially missing data and assess relative model performance based on the receiver...

We model the United States macroeconomic and financial sectors using a formal and unified econometric model. Through shrinkage, our Bayesian VAR provides a flexible framework for modeling the dynamics of thirty-one variables, many of which are tracked by the Federal Reserve. We show how the...

This paper illustrates the usefulness of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods in approximating DSGE model posterior distributions. We show how the tempering schedule can be chosen adaptively, explore the benefits of an SMC variant we call generalized tempering for "online" estimation, and...

We measure dislocations in the market for corporate bonds in real time with the Corporate Bond Market Distress Index (CMDI), allowing for the aggregation of a broad set of measures of market functioning from primary and secondary bond markets into a single measure. The index quantifies...