This paper conducts a real-time, out-of-sample analysis of the forecasting power of various aggregate financial intermediaries' balance sheets to a wide range of economic activity measures in the United States. I find evidence that the balance sheets of leveraged financial institutions do have...

In this paper, the authors develop a new tool to improve the short-term forecasting of real GDP growth in the euro area and Japan. This new tool, which uses unrestricted mixed-data sampling (U-MIDAS) regressions, allows an evaluation of the usefulness of a wide range of indicators in predicting...

This paper considers the adaptability of estimation methods for binary response panel data models to multiple fixed effects. It is motivated by the gravity equation used in international trade, where important papers such as Helpman, Melitz and Rubinstein (2008) use binary response models with...

This paper examines the business cycle linkages that propagate industry-specific business cycle shocks throughout the economy in a way that (sometimes) generates aggregated cycles. The transmission of sectoral business cycles is modelled through a multivariate Markov-switching model, which is...

The answer as to whether there are gains from pooling real-time oil price forecasts depends on the objective. The approach of combining five of the leading forecasting models with equal weights dominates the strategy of selecting one model and using it for all horizons up to two years. Even more...

Estimation of the quantile model, especially with a large data set, can be computationally burdensome. This paper proposes using the Gaussian approximation, also known as quantile coupling, to estimate a quantile model. The intuition of quantile coupling is to divide the original observations...

Using the Baker et al. (2013) index of policy uncertainty for six developed countries, this paper estimates spillovers of policy uncertainty. We find that spillovers account for slightly more than one-fourth of the dynamics of policy uncertainty in these countries, with this share rising to...

Studies such as Lemmon, Roberts and Zender (2008) demonstrate how stable firms' capital structures are over time, and raise the question of whether new theories of capital structure are needed to explain these phenomena. In this paper, I show that trade-off theory-based empirical proxies that...