This paper aims at contributing to the understanding of how the ECB conducts monetary policy as seen from a money market perspective. More specifically it covers two different issues. First, it looks at the learning period for banks since the Eurosystem started implementing the single monetary...

This paper studies the cyclical properties of real GDP, house prices, credit, and nominal liquid financial assets in 17 EU countries, by applying several methods to extract cycles. The estimates confirm earlier findings of large medium-term cycles in credit volumes and house prices. GDP appears...

During the last crisis, developed economies' sovereign Credit Default Swap (hereafter CDS) premia have gained in importance as a tool for approximating credit risk. In this paper, we fit a dynamic factor model to decompose the sovereign CDS spreads of ten OECD economies into three components: a...

The Great Moderation (GM) is widely documented in the literature as one of the most important changes in the US business cycle. All the papers that analyze it use post-WWII data. In this paper, we set the GM for the first time against a long-dated historical backdrop, stretching back a century...

We study the effects of credit over the business cycle, distinguishing between expansions and contractions. We find that there is a growth and risk trade-off in the pace of credit growth over the business cycle. While rapid credit growth tends to be followed by deeper recessions, we also find...

We propose an empirical framework to measure the degree of weakness of the global economy in real-time. It relies on nonlinear factor models designed to infer recessionary episodes of heterogeneous deepness, and fitted to the largest advanced economies (U.S., Euro Area, Japan, U.K., Canada and...

We find that the composite leading index (CLI) is useful forforecasting GNP, both in sample and in an out-of-sample real-time exercise. We propose a nonlinear specification in which cyclical shifts of the CLI precede those in GNP. However, we find that better forecasts are provided by a simple...

Since 1984, the U.S. economy has grown at a remarkably steady pace. An analysis of this increased stability shows that every major component of GDP has exhibited smoother growth. However, two components - inventory investment and consumer spending - are responsible for the bulk of the decline in...