The financial crisis and the European sovereign debt crisis have shown that financial stress may be an important driver for economic activity. In this paper, I derive a financial stress index for Germany, using a dynamic approximate factor model that summarizes a stress component of various...

We examine fluctuations in employment growth using Canadian data from 1976 to 2010. We consider a wide range of models and examine the sensitivity of our findings to modelling assumptions. The results from our most preferred model, which we selected using the Bayesian Information Criteria,...

We use factor augmented vector autoregressive models with time-varying coefficients and stochastic volatility to construct a financial conditions index that can accurately track expectations about growth in key US macroeconomic variables. Time-variation in the models׳ parameters allows for the...