We review, under a historical perspective, the development of the problem of nonfundamentalness of Moving Average (MA) representations of economic models. Nonfundamentalness typically arises when agents’ information space is larger than the econometrician’s one. Therefore it is impossible...

We test the performance of a host of real and financial variables as early warning indicators for costly aggregate asset price boom/bust cycles, using data for 18 OECD countries between 1970 and 2007. A signalling approach is used to predict asset price booms that have relatively serious real...

This paper explores the statistical properties of house-hold consumption-expenditure budget share distributions —defined as the share of household total expenditure spent for purchasing a specific category of commodities— for a large sample of Italian households in the period 1989-2004. We...

We propose a new method for multivariate forecasting which combines Dynamic Factor and multivariate GARCH models. The information contained in large datasets is captured by few dynamic common factors, which we assume being conditionally heteroskedastic. After presenting the model, we propose a...

This paper aims at providing policymakers with a set of early warning indicators helpful in guiding decisions on when to activate macroprudential tools targeting excessive credit growth and leverage. To robustly select the key indicators we apply the “Random Forest” method, which bootstraps...

Mainstream macroeconomic theory predicts a rapid response of asset prices to monetary policy shocks, which conventional empirical models are unable to reproduce. We argue that this is due to a deficient information set: Forward-looking economic agents observe vastly more information than the...

This paper presents the analysis underpinning the ESRB Recommendation on guidance on setting countercyclical buffer rates (ESRB 2014/1). The Recommendation is designed to help authorities tasked with setting the countercyclical capital buffer (CCB) to operationalise this new macroprudential...

In November 2015, the European Commission adopted a legislative proposal to set up a European Deposit Insurance Scheme (EDIS), a single deposit insurance system for all bank deposits in the Banking Union. JRC was requested to quantitatively assess the effectiveness of introducing a single...

We construct a unique and comprehensive data set of 19 real-time daily macroeconomic indicators for 11 Eurozone countries, for the 5/11/2009{4/25/2013 period. We use this new data set to characterize the time-varying dependence of the cross-section of sovereign credit default swap (CDS) spreads...

Economic theory typically assumes the existence of few unobserved unpredictable stochastic disturbances, called structural shocks, driving the whole economy. Would the economy be representable as a very high dimensional stochastic vector process, those shocks would be the reduced rank innovation...