The cross-sectional average of pairwise correlations across stocks traded on the NYSE, AMEX, and Nasdaq is a powerful predictor of U.S. economic activity at a horizon of one to four years. Its predictive ability is on a par with the slope of the yield curve and significantly exceeds that of some...

We analyze the contribution of credit spread, house and stock price shocks to GDP growth in the US based on a Bayesian VAR with time-varying parameters estimated over 1958-2012. Our main findings are: (i) The contribution of financial shocks to GDP growth fluctuates from about 20 percent in...

We assess the effects of financial shocks on inflation, and to what extent financial shocks can account for the "missing disinflation" during the Great Recession. We apply a vector autoregressive model to US data and identify financial shocks through sign restrictions. Our main finding is that...

We document that expansionary monetary policy shocks are less effective at stimulating output and investment in periods of high volatility compared to periods of low volatility, using a regime-switching vector autoregression. The lower effectiveness of monetary policy can be linked to weaker...

Bank capital regulations are intended to enhance financial stability in the long run, but may, in the meanwhile, involve costs for the real economy. To examine these costs we propose a narrative index of aggregate tightenings in regulatory US bank capital requirements from 1979 to 2008....

This study investigates the bank competition-stability nexus using a unique regulatory dataset provided by the Deutsche Bundesbank over the period 1994 to 2010. First, we use outright bank defaults as the most direct measure of bank risk available and contrast the results to weaker forms of bank...

The uncertainty of U.S. core inflation, measured by the stochastic volatility of forecast errors, has soared to a level not seen in nearly five decades since the COVID-19 pandemic hit the global economy. Prices, consumption, and production increase after a positive shock to core inflation...