Theories of systemic risk suggest that financial intermediaries' balance-sheet constraints amplify fundamental shocks. We provide supporting evidence for such theories by decomposing the U.S. dollar risk premium into components associated with macroeconomic fundamentals and a component...

Detection of structural change is a critical empirical activity, but continuous ‘monitoring' of time series for structural changes in real time raises well-known econometric issues. These have been explored in a univariate context. If multiple series co-break, as may be plausible, then it is...

We revisit in this note the macroeconomic impact of the recent rise in trade policy uncertainty. As in the literature, we do find that high trade policy uncertainty can adversely impact domestic and foreign economic activity. In addition, we identify an alternative business sentiment channel...

The reduced-form correlation between inflation and measures of real activity has changed substantially for the main developed economies over the post-WWII period. In this paper we attempt to describe the observed inflation dynamics in the United Kingdom, the United States and the euro area with...

In this paper we report estimates of the effective sterling, sterling/Deutsche mark and sterling/US dollar risk premia over a monthly 1987-2001 sample, generated using a conditional factor model for the stochastic discount factor of a representative worldwide investor. The model relates this...

Factor-augmented regressions are often used as a parsimonious way of modeling a variable using information from a large data-set, through a few factors estimated from this data-set. But how does one determine the appropriate number of factors that are relevant for such a regression? Existing...

Official Chinese GDP growth rates have been remarkably smooth over the past decade, in contrast with alternative Chinese economic data. To better identify Chinese business cycles, we construct a sparse partial least squares (PLS) factor from a wide array of Chinese higher-frequency data,...

We propose measures of financial market stress for forty-six countries and regions across the world. Our measures indicate that worldwide financial market stresses rose significantly in March following the widespread economic shutdowns in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, hardly...

In this paper we seek to produce forecasts of commodity price movements that can systematically improve on naive statistical benchmarks, and revisit the forecasting performance of changes in commodity currencies as efficient predictors of commodity prices, a view emphasized in the recent...

We compare a number of data-rich prediction methods that are widely used in macroeconomic forecasting with a lesser known alternative: partial least squares (PLS) regression. In this method, linear, orthogonal combinations of a large number of predictor variables are constructed such that the...