The sentiment of news predicts the short-term stock market performance of individual companies. We find that this association is solely due to the idiosyncratic informational content of an article. We transparently quantify the association between news sentiment and stock market performance of...

We survey the nascent literature on machine learning in the study of financial markets. We highlight the best examples of what this line of research has to offer and recommend promising directions for future research. This survey is designed for both financial economists interested in grasping...

We postulate a nonlinear DSGE model with a financial sector and heterogeneous households. In our model, the interaction between the supply of bonds by the financial sector and the precautionary demand for bonds by households produces significant endogenous aggregate risk. This risk induces an...

Central bank intervention in the form of quantitative easing (QE) during times of low interest rates is a controversial topic. This paper introduces a novel approach to study the effectiveness of such unconventional measures. Using U.S. data on six key financial and macroeconomic variables...

We measure the time-varying strength of macrofinancial linkages within and across the US and euro area economies by relying on factor models with drifting parameters, where real and financial cycles are extracted and shocks are identified via sign and exclusion restrictions. The main results...

A large set of financial variables has only limited power to predict a latent factor common to the year-ahead forecast errors for real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, the unemployment rate, and Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation for three sets of professional forecasters: the Federal...

A large set of financial variables has only limited power to predict a latent factor common to the year-ahead forecast errors for real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, the unemployment rate, and Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation for three sets of professional forecasters: the Federal...

In this paper we assess the merits of financial condition indices constructed using simple averages versus a more sophisticated alternative that uses factor models with time varying parameters. Our analysis is based on data for 18 advanced and emerging economies at a monthly frequency covering...

This paper investigates the power of macroeconomic factors to explain euro area bond risk premia using (i) a big dataset (ii) the Elastic Net variable selection. We find that macroeconomic factors, in particular economic activity and sentiment indicators, explain 40% of the variability of risk...