Housing conditions in Belgium are among the best in OECD countries according to the Better Life Index, as dwellings are of high quality and large, and housing costs are average. However, the steep increase in house prices since 2003 has put market access for first-time buyers under pressure....

Investment has rebounded during the recent economic revival, but from a low level. The investment slump during the crisis was mostly caused by a fall in residential investment. However, business investment has been trending downwards since 1990, holding back capital stock accumulation and...

We introduce Longitudinal Factor Analysis (LFA) to extract the Common Risk Free (CRF) rate from a sample of sovereign bonds of countries in a monetary union. Since LFA exploits the typically very large longitudinal dimension of bond data, it performs better than traditional factor analysis...

Public debt is a very weak predictor of a country's credit rating if a country's other features are not taken into account. However, everything else equal, more public debt is associated with worse ratings. This paper explores the relationship between debt and sovereign creditworthiness by...

We develop a sovereign default risk index using natural language processing techniques and 10 million news articles covering over 100 countries. The index is a highfrequency measure of countries' default risk, particularly for those lacking marketbased measures: it correlates with sovereign CDS...

During the pandemic, African banks rebalanced their portfolio towards sovereign assets, and crowding out of credit to private sector intensified. Policy support, however, averted a credit crunch. The increase in public debt across Africa due to the COVID-19 crisis intensified crowding out of...