We test the usefulness of Machine Learning (ML) for sovereign risk assessment and pricing in the euro area along two important dimensions: i) their predictive accuracy compared to traditional econometrics methods and, ii) their assessment on what are the most important economic factors behind...

Central Bank speeches usually function as aggregators of internal quantitative and qualitative analysis of the institutions regarding the macro economy, the monetary policy and the health of the financial systems. Speeches usually function as a summary of the current status of a countries...

This study seeks to answer whether it is possible to design an early warning system framework that can signal the risk of fiscal stress in the near future, and what shape such a system should take. To do so, multiple models based on econometric logit and the random forest models are designed and...

Galvanized by the claims of Greenwood et al. in Bubbles for Fama that “a sharp price increase of an industry portfolio does not, on average, predict unusually low returns going forward”, and Fama’s quote (June, 2016) that “Statistically, people have not come up with ways of identifying...

On 4 March 2011, SUERF – The European Money and Finance Forum and the National Bank of Poland jointly organised a conference on the theme of: "Monetary Policy after the Crisis". Following a call for papers with a large number of submissions, the scientific committee selected 9 papers, which...

The paper investigates the life-cycle of the 2008-2009 financial crisis by linking the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure (MIP) Scoreboard of the European Commission to the crisis database of the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB). The novelty of the analysis is that early warning capacity of...

This paper shows how the role of Financial Soundness Indicators (FSIs) in financial surveillance can be usefully enhanced. Drawing from different statistical techniques, the paper illustrates that FSIs generate signals that can accurately detect, with 4 to 12 quarters lead, emerging financial...

This paper examines the relation between variations in perceived inflation uncertainty and bond premia. Using the subjective probability distributions available in the Survey of Professional Forecasters we construct a quarterly time series of average individual uncertainty about inflation...

Modeling short-term interest rates as following regime-switching processes has become increasingly popular. Theoretically, regime-switching models are able to capture rational expectations of infrequently occurring discrete events. Technically, they allow for potential time-varying stationarity....

This study uses Markov-switching models to evaluate the informational content of the term structure as a predictor of recessions in eight OECD countries. The empirical results suggest that for all countries the term spread is sensibly modelled as a two-state regime-switching process. Moreover,...