This paper proposes a general statistical framework for systemic financial stress indexes. Several existing index designs can be represented as special cases. We introduce a daily variant of the ECB's CISS for the euro area and the US. The CISS aggregates a representative set of stress...

There is a general acceptance of the fact that a significant direct relationship between financial markets and macroeconomic variables exists, especially by considering the assertion that developed financial markets correspond to high GDP levels. This paper provides an investigation of the...

Regional differences in banking integration determined how Japan s Great Recession after 1990 spread across the country. We explain these differences with the emergence of silk reeling as the main export industry after Japan s opening to trade in the 19th century. The silk-exporting prefectures...

Since the onset of the eurozone sovereign debt crisis, credit risk spreads in Europe have diverged. Despite this divergence, credit risk comoves strongly within certain country groups such as the eurozone periphery. We seek to answer what the determinants of the observed pattern of credit risk...

We provide empirical evidence that US financial stress shocks (US-FSSs) are an important driver for economic dynamics and fluctuations in emerging market economies (EMEs). Applying a structural vector autoregression, we analyze the international transmission of US-FSSs to eight EMEs using...

In past years, the most common approaches for deriving early-warning models belong to the family of binary-choice methods, which have been coupled with a separate loss function to optimize model signals based on policymakers preferences. The evidence in this paper shows that early-warning models...

In light of the recent large swings in stock and housing prices accompanied by ample global liquidity, the role of monetary policy in the build-up of asset price bubbles has been questioned. This paper will contribute to the debate whether central banks can and should stronger "lean against the...

Economic theory predicts that, in a small open economy, the dynamics of the real price of gold should be linked to real interest rates and the rate of change of the real exchange rate. Using data for Australia, we use a real-time forecasting approach to analyze whether real interest rates and...

Persistent variations in the log price-to-dividend ratio (PtDR) have triggered a lively discussion in the literature. This paper proposes a present value model incorporating this persistence through a time-varying steady state of the PtDR. Log-likelihood statistics confirm that the time-varying...