Following the debate on the relationship between business and financial cycle rekindled in the last decade since the global financial crisis, we assess the ability of some financial indicators to track the Italian business cycle. We mostly use credit variables to detect the turning points and to...

This paper examines the interactions between financial conditions and business cycles in Mongolia, a small open economy, heavily depending on commodity exports. We construct two financial conditions indexes based on the reduced form IS model and the vector autoregression (VAR) model as...

We argue that strong globalization forces have been an important determinant of globalreal interest rates over the last five decades, as they have been key drivers of changes inthe natural real interest rate-i.e. the interest rate consistent with output at its potentialand constant inflation. An...

We construct a Financial Conditions Index (FCI) for Greece as a surveillance tool to quantify the degree of the stress in the financial sector. We use principal component analysis to capture the information content of several financial indicators through a single index. We also construct an...

We introduce a structural quantile vector autoregressive (VAR) model. Unlike standard VAR which models only the average interaction of the endogenous variables, quantile VAR models their interaction at any quantile. We show how to estimate and forecast multivariate quantiles within a recursive...

This collection of papers analyzes the versatility and predictive power of survey expectations data in asset pricing and macroeconomic forecasting. The first paper, Using Sentiment Surveys to Predict GDP Growth and Stock Returns sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment...

Based on a unique data set referencing exposures on single name credit default swaps (CDS) on European reference entities, we study the structure and the topology of the European CDS market and its evolution from 2008 to 2012, resorting to network analysis. The structural features revealed show...

We implement a two-step approach to construct a financing conditions index (FCI) for the euro area and its four larger member states (Germany, France, Italy and Spain). The method, which follows Hatzius et al. (2010), is based on factor analysis and enables to summarise information on financing...

Beginning with [Johansen (1960)], computable general equilibrium (CGE) models have been widely applied to study the impact of a variety of economic policy issues. These include changes in macroeconomic or regional economic policies such as tariff reductions, changes in labour force demographics...

We construct a small-open-economy, New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model with real-financial linkages to analyze the effects of financial shocks and macroprudential policies on the Canadian economy. Our model has four key features. First, it allows for non-trivial...