This paper proposes a measure of real-time inflation expectations based on metadata, i.e., data about data, constructed from internet search queries performed on the search engine Google. The forecasting performance of the Google Inflation Search Index (GISI) is assessed relative to 37 other...

For decades, the academic literature has focused on three survey measures of expected inflation: the Livingston Survey, the Survey of Professional Forecasters, and the Michigan Survey. While these measures have been useful in developing models of forecasting inflation, the data are low frequency...

This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

The recent global financial crisis has intensified calls to make the financial sector less crisis-prone, and to this end to make impairment recognition rules for debt instruments more forward looking. To better understand the behavior of different impairment rules and their potential effect on...

This thesis consists of four self-contained papers related to banking, credit markets and financial stability. Paper [I] presents a credit market model and finds, using an agent based modeling approach, that credit crunches have a tendency to occur; even when credit markets are almost entirely...

We develop a portfolio risk model that uses high-frequency data to forecast the loss surface, which is the set of loss distributions at future time horizons. Our model uses a fully automated, semi-parametric fitting procedure that has its basis in extreme value statistics. We take account of...

We propose serial correlation-robust asymptotic confidence bands for the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and its functional, viz. the area under ROC curve (AUC), estimated by quasi-maximum likelihood in the binormal model. Our simulation experiments confirm that this new method...

We document a substantial increase in downside risk to US economic growth over the last 30 years. By modelling secular trends and cyclical changes of the predictive density of GDP growth, we find an accelerating decline in the skewness of the conditional distributions, with significant,...

I present evidence that higher frequency measures of inflation expectations outperform lower frequency measures of inflation expectations in tests of accuracy, predictive power, and rationality. For decades, the academic literature has focused on three survey measures of expected inflation: the...

For decades, the academic literature has focused on three survey measures of expected inflation: the Livingston Survey, the Survey of Professional Forecasters, and the Michigan Survey. While these measures have been useful in developing models of forecasting inflation, the data are low frequency...