This paper analyses leading indicator properties of a broad set of credit spreads, compiled on the basis of information from both corporate bonds and bank loans for forecasting of real activity, unemployment, inflation and lending volumes in the euro area and in five major European economies. It...

Why does the short-term slope of the yield curve predict recessions? We explore the economic forces underlying Treasury yields' fluctuations and highlight the roles of a tight monetary policy stance and expectations of lower inflation in predicting downturns. While the monetary policy stance is...

Why is an inverted yield-curve slope such a powerful predictor of future recessions? We show that a decomposition of the yield curve slope into its expectations and risk premia components helps disentangle the channels that connect fluctuations in Treasury rates and the future state of the...

This paper describes the official Riksbank forecasts for the period 2000-06. The forecast variables are those that are important for monetary policy analysis, i.e. inflation, GDP, productivity, employment, labour force, unemployment and financial variables such as interest rate and foreign...

Jarocinski and Karadi (2020) disentangle a pure information from the interest rate component of monetary policy surprises. This note quantifies the information revealed in FOMC announcements using forecast revisions from Blue Chip Economic Indicators. In response to a positive central bank...

Empirical evidence concerning the link between monetary aggregates and inflation or GDP growth has been underemphasized in recent years. This paper re-examines existing simple sum and creates composite monetary aggregates a la Feldstein and Stock (1996) in the Canadian context over the 1971-99...

The ability of term spread to forecast U.S. output growth could be improved by two ways: (i) Combining with the Harrod-Domar variable - net saving as a percentage of gross national income - that used to proxy for aggregate supply; and (ii) Using a system of simultaneous equations, in which U.S....

Since the 1970s, an inverted yield curve has been a reliable signal of an imminent recession. One interpretation of this signal is that markets expect monetary policy to ease as the Federal Reserve responds to an upcoming deterioration in economic conditions. Some have argued that the yield...

This paper demonstrates that the ability of the yield spread to predict output fluctuations is contingent on the monetary authority's reaction function. In particular, expectations of monetary policy actions are crucial for the spread to predict output conditional on the short-rate. Furthermore,...