This paper studies the performance of U.S. taxable bond mutual funds employing a novel data set of portfolio weights. Active fund managers exhibit outperformance before costs and fees generating, on average, gross returns of 1% per annum over the benchmark portfolio constructed using past...

This paper studies the informational content of the slope of the yield curve as a predictor of recessions in the euro area and provides evidence of the potential usefulness of this indicator for monetary policy purposes. In particular, the historical predictive power of ten variations of yield...

Against the background of the rapid inter- and intra-regional integration of East Asia, we examine the extent and nature of synchronisation of business cycles in the region. We estimate a dynamic common factor model for output growth of 10 East Asian countries. A significant common factor is...