To examine whether including economic data on other countries could improve the forecast of U.S. GDP growth, we construct a large data set of 77 countries representing over 90 percent of global GDP. Our benchmark model is a dynamic factor model using U.S. data only, which we extend to include...

Today, the problem facing the United States is not whether cryptocurrencies are money or “thin air,” Iran's nuclear ambition, or COVID-19 induced recession; it is China's fast acceleration in becoming a game changer in the world order that the U.S. has dominated for more than a century....

The worst two financial crises in human history were in some ways attributable to the US Federal Reserve's misguided monetary policies. Many economists share the view that the Fed's tight-money policy in the late 1920s caused a significant drop in the money stock (i.e. severe contraction) which...

Given the prospects of asynchronous monetary conditions in the United States and the euro area, this paper analyzes spillovers among these two economies, as well as the implications of asynchronicity for spillovers to other advanced economies and emerging markets. Through a structural vector...

This paper studies the role of confidence in the transmission of uncertainty shocks during U.S. recessions. I use smooth-transition VAR to examine the regime-dependent effect of uncertainty shocks, and a counterfactual decomposition to isolate the role of confidence when the economy is in...

This paper proposes a new methodology based on textual analysis to forecast U.S. recessions. Specifically, the paper develops an index in the spirit of Baker et al. (2016) and Caldara and Iacoviello (2018) which tracks developments in U.S. real activity. When used in a standard recession...

We model the United States macroeconomic and financial sectors using a formal and unified econometric model. Through shrinkage, our Bayesian VAR provides a flexible framework for modeling the dynamics of thirty-one variables, many of which are tracked by the Federal Reserve. We show how the...

We explore the historical relationship between financial conditions and real economic growth for quarterly U.S. data from 1875 to 2017 with a flexible empirical copula modelling methodology. We compare specifications with both linear and non-linear dependence, and with both Gaussian and...

Every quarter, the Bank of Canada conducts quarterly consultations with businesses across Canada, referred to as the Business Outlook Survey (BOS). A principal-component analysis conducted by Pichette and Rennison (2011) led to the development of the BOS indicator, which summarizes survey...

We reassess the predictability of U.S. recessions at horizons from three months to two years ahead for a large number of previously proposed leading-indicator variables. We employ an efficient probit estimator for partially missing data and assess relative model performance based on the receiver...