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...

This paper contributes to the debate of whether central banks can \lean against the wind" of emerging stock or house price bubbles. Against this background, the paper evaluates if new advances in real-time bubble detection, as brought forward by Phillips et al. (2011), can timely detect bubble...

This study uses Markov-switching models to evaluate the informational content of the term structure as a predictor of recessions in eight OECD countries. The empirical results suggest that for all countries the term spread is sensibly modelled as a two-state regime-switching process. Moreover,...

This paper examines the ability of bond and stock markets to predict subsequent GDP growth over a range of horizons for twelve international countries. The results, using linear, probit, time- and regime-varying in-sample regressions and out-of-sample forecasting, confirm the view that both...

This paper identifies supply and demand shocks that are specific to the oil-market, and separates them from economy-wide shocks that affect the demand for many asset classes, including oil. The shocks are identified by the sign and magnitude of the correlation between daily oil price percent...

The paper investigates the determinants of the US$/€ exchange rate since its introduction in 1999, with a special focus on the recent subprime mortgage and sovereign debt financial crises. The econometric model is grounded on the asset pricing theory of exchange rate determination, which...

This paper contributes to the debate of whether central banks can "lean against the wind" of emerging stock or house price bubbles. Against this background, the paper evaluates if new advances in real-time bubble detection, as brought forward by Phillips et al. (2011), can timely detect bubble...

Since 2009 conditions in Italian credit market have been experiencing a dramatic worsening, reflecting the two most severe recessions since the Great Depression. Probability of default for non financial firms has reached unexpected values, while deterioration in credit portfolios has spread....

We document a substantial increase in downside risk to US economic growth over the last 30 years. By modelling secular trends and cyclical changes of the predictive density of GDP growth, we find an accelerating decline in the skewness of the conditional distributions, with significant,...

We re-visit a puzzling result that in U.S. post-WW II data the dividend price ratio can predict aggregate returns but not dividend growth. We find that predictive regressions are sensitive to the method used to aggregate firm-level data. Using value weighted firm-level data we find strong...