It is difficult to identify the driving forces behind financial market developments as they are not directly observable. The paper argues that correlations between asset prices in different markets can be used to infer which of five macroeconomic factors that drive markets (growth and inflation...

Over-borrowing and financial stress has recently become an important issue in macroeconomic and policy discussions in the US as well as in the EU. In this paper the authors study two regimes of financial stress. In a regime of high financial stress, stress shocks can have large and persistent...