This paper employs a recent statistical algorithm (CRAGGING) in order to build an early warning model for banking crises in emerging markets. We perturb our data set many times and create "artificial" samples from which we estimated our model, so that, by construction, it is flexible enough to...

This paper investigates how biases in macroeconomic forecasts are associated with economic surprises and market responses across asset classes around US data announcements. We find that the skewness of the distribution of economic forecasts is a strong predictor of economic surprises, suggesting...

Professional forecasters of economic data are remunerated based on accuracy and positive publicity generated for their firms. This remuneration structure incentivizes them to stick to the consensus but also to make bold forecasts when they perceive to have private information. We find that bold...

Professional forecasters of economic data are remunerated based on accuracy and positive publicity generated for their firms. This remuneration structure incentivizes them to stick to the median forecast but also to make bold forecasts when they perceive to have superior private information. We...

Many modern macro finance models imply that excess returns on arbitrary assets are predictable via the price-dividend ratio and the variance risk premium of the aggregate stock market. We propose a simple empirical test for the ability of such a model to explain the cross-section of expected...

We show that the news is a rich source of data on distressed firm links that drive firm- level and aggregate risks. The news tends to report about links in which a less popular firm is distressed and may contaminate a more popular firm. This constitutes a contagion channel that yields...

Because of secrecy, little is known about the political economy of central bank lending. Utilizing a novel, hand-collected historical daily dataset on loans to commercial banks, we analyze how personal connections matter for lending of last resort, highlighting the importance of governance for...

This paper describes concepts and tools behind macroprudential monitoring and the growing importance of macroprudential tools for assessing the stability of financial systems. This paper also employs a macroprudential approach in examining financial soundness and identifying its determinants....