Leading into a debt crisis, interest rate spreads on sovereign debt rise before the economy experiences a decline in productivity, suggesting that news about future economic developments may play an important role in these episodes. In a VAR estimation, a news shock has a larger contemporaneous...

We develop distress prediction models for non-financial small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) using a dataset from eight European countries over the period 2000-2009. We examine idiosyncratic and systematic covariates and find that macro conditions and bankruptcy codes add predictive power...

This paper presents a credit gap for Malta derived from a semi-structural multivariate filter. This modelling approach has several advantages over univariate approaches typically used, for example to construct the Basel gap. The multivariate filtering of observed data into trends and cycles is...