In 1936, John Maynard Keynes proposed that emotions and instincts are pivotal in decision-making, particularly for investors. Both positive and negative moods can influence judgments and decisions, extending to economic and financial choices. Intuitions, emotional states, and biases...

Policy impact studies often suffer from endogeneity problems. Consider the case of the ECB Securities Markets Programme: if Eurosystem interventions were triggered by sudden and strong price deteriorations, looking at daily price changes may bias downwards the correlation between yields and the...

In this paper, we exploit micro data from the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) to examine the link between the characteristics of macroeconomic density forecasts (such as their location, spread, skewness and tail risk) and density forecast performance. Controlling for the effects of...

Forecasting the world economy is a di¢ cult task given the complex interre-lationships within and across countries. This paper proposes a number ofapproaches to forecast short-term changes in selected world economic vari-ables and aims, …rst, at ranking various forecasting methods in terms...

We introduce a methodology to characterise financial cycles combining a novel multivariate spectral approach to identifying common cycle frequencies across a set of indicators, and a time varying aggregation emphasising systemic developments. The methodology is applied to 13 European Union...

This paper assesses the forecasting performance of various variable reduction and variable selection methods. A small and a large set of wisely chosen variables are used in forecasting the industrial production growth for four Euro Area economies. The results indicate that the Automatic Leading...

We measure the commonality in hedge fund returns, identify its main driving factor and analyze its implications for financial stability. We find that hedge funds' commonality increased significantly from 2003 until 2006. We attribute this rise mainly to the increase in hedge funds' exposure to...

Savings accounts are owned by most households, but little is known about the performance of households' investments. We create a unique dataset by matching information on individual savings accounts from the DNB Household Survey with market data on account-specific interest rates and...