The U.S. business cycle typically leads the European cycle by a few quarters and this can be used to forecast euro area GDP. We investigate whether financial variables carry additional information. We use vector autoregressions (VARs) which include the U.S. and the euro area GDPs as a minimal...

Economic theory suggests that vulnerable financial conditions of the corporate sector can trigger or worsen an economy-wide recession. This paper proposes a measure of corporate vulnerability, the Corporate Vulnerability Index (CVI) and analyses whether it can explain the probability and...

The objective of this paper is to provide a retrospective assessment of our ability to have predicted the impact of the 1997 crisis on the Korean corporate sector. We perform some simple stress tests on the aggregate balance sheets and income statements of the corporate sector to determine what...

News - or foresight - about future economic fundamentals can create rational expectations equilibria with non-fundamental representations that pose substantial challenges to econometric efforts to recover the structural shocks to which economic agents react. Using tax policies as a leading...

Financial conditions indexes are developed for the United States and euro area using a wide range of financial indicators and a dynamic factor model. The financial conditions indexes are shown to be useful for forecasting economic activity and have good revision properties.