When do financial markets help in predicting economic activity? With incomplete markets, the link between financial and real economy is state-dependent and financial indicators may turn out to be useful particularly in forecasting "tail" macroeconomic events. We examine this conjecture by...

This paper investigates the nonlinearity in the effects of news shocks about technological innovations. In a maximally flexible logistic smooth transition vector autoregressive model, state-dependent effects of news shocks are identified based on medium-run restrictions. We propose a novel...

The empirical importance of news shocks—anticipated future shocks—in business cycle fluctuations has been explored by using only actual data when estimating models augmented with news shocks. This paper additionally exploits forecast data to identify news shocks in a canonical...

Recent studies attempt to quantify the empirical importance of news shocks (ie., anticipated future shocks) in business cycle fluctuations. This paper identifies news shocks in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model estimated with not only actual data but also forecast data. The...

Financial bubbles are subject to debate and controversy. However, they are not well understood and are hardly ever characterised specifically, especially ex ante. We define a bubble as a period of unsustainable growth, when the price of an asset increases ever more quickly, in a series of...

The Basel credit-to-GDP gap is the single most popular measure of excessive credit growth and the financial cycle in general. It is based, however, on a purely statistical understanding of excessiveness: Growth is excessive if the credit-to-GDP ratio (i.e. the ratio of credit to nominal GDP) is...

To nowcast output gap turning points, probabilistic indicators are created from a simple and transparent machine-learning algorithm known as Learning Vector Quantization. The real-time ability of the indicators to quickly and accurately detect economic turning points in the United States and in...