Bond yield and retail interest rate spreads are presumed to lead real activity on the basis of financial accelerator mechanisms, markup cyclicality or simply because they are forward-looking. Empirical results for Austria show that retail rate spreads outperform many other indicators in this...

This paper studies whether financial variables per se should matter for monetary policy. Earlier consensus view -using financial amplification models with disturbances that have no direct effect on credit market conditions- suggests that financial variables should not be assigned an independent...

Feedback from stock prices to cash flows occurs because information revealed by firms' stock prices influences the actions of competitors. We explore the implications of feedback within a noisy rational expectations setting with publicly listed and private firms. In our setting, stock prices are...