Most macroeconomic indicators failed to capture the sharp economic fluctuations during the Corona crisis in a timely manner. Instead, alternative high-frequency data have been used, aiming to monitor the economic situation. However, these data are often only loosely related to the business cycle...

In this paper, we propose a method for jointly estimating indexes of economic and financial conditions by exploiting the intertemporal link between their cyclical behavior. This method combines a dynamic factor model for the joint modeling of economic and financial variables with mixed...

Measuring economic activity in real-time is a crucial issue in applied research and in the decision-making process of policy makers; however, it also poses intricate challenges to statistical filtering methods that are built to operate optimally under the auspices of an infinite number of...

Severe simultaneous recessions are defined to occur when at least half of the countries under investigation (Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, United Kingdom, and United States) are in recession simultaneously. I pose two new research questions that extend upon stylized facts for US recessions....

High-frequency financial and economic activity indicators are usually time aggregated before forecasts of low-frequency macroeconomic events, such as recessions, are computed. We propose a mixed-frequency modelling alternative that delivers high-frequency probability forecasts (including their...

In this paper a new method of constructing the leading economic index is presented. Its main advantage is the ability to distinguish domestic and foreign factors influencing the growth of economy and it is performed via dynamic hierarchical factor modelling. An application is carried out with...

This paper proposes an econometric model of the joint dynamic relationship between the yield curve and the economy to predict business cycles. We examine the predictive value of the yield curve to forecast both future economic growth as well as the beginning and end of economic recessions at the...

The paper questions the reasonability of using forecast error variance decompositions for assessing the role of different structural shocks in business cycle fluctuations. It is shown that the forecast error variance decomposition is related to a dubious definition of the business cycle. A...

Assessing macroeconomic demand conditions is critical for monetary policy to gaugeimminent inflationary pressures. Generally, measures of output gap, calculated byapplying statistical filters on GDP data, are used for this purpose. GDP data, however,are released only at quarterly frequency with...

This paper aims at providing a detailed analysis of the leading indicator properties of corporate bond spreads for real economic activity in the euro area. In- and out-of-sample predictive content of corporate bond spreads are examined along three dimensions: the bonds’ quality , their term to...