We provide evidence that changes in the equity price and volatility of individual firms (measures that approximate the definition of 'granular shock' given in Gabaix, 2010) are key to improve the predictability of aggregate business cycle fluctuations in a number of countries. Specifically,...

We test whether a simple measure of corporate insolvency based on equity return volatility - and denoted as Distance to Insolvency (DI) - delivers better predictions of corporate default than the widely-used Expected Default Frequency (EDF) measure computed by Moody's. We look at the predictive...

We provide evidence that changes in the equity price and volatility of individual firms (measures that approximate the definition of 'granular shock' given in Gabaix, 2010) are key to improve the predictability of aggregate business cycle fluctuations in a number of countries. Specifically,...

We test whether a simple measure of corporate insolvency based on equity return volatility -and denoted as Distance to Insolvency (DI) - delivers better prediction of corporate defaults than the widely-used Expected Default Frequency (EDF) measure computed by Moody’s. We look at the predictive...

In the paper we propose a new methodological approach to core inflation estimation, based on a frequency domain principal components estimator, suited to estimate systems of fractionally cointegrated processes. The proposed core inflation measure is the scaled common persistent factor in...

In this paper we study the zero frequency spectral properties of fractionally cointegrated long memory processes and introduce a new frequency domain principal components estimator of the cointegration space and the factor loading matrix for the long memory factors. We find that for fractionally...

We provide a methodology to disentangle the long-run relation between variables from their own dynamics. Macroeconomic and aggregate financial series have a high degree of inertia. If this persistence is not properly accounted for, spurious correlations will give rise to paradoxes. Our procedure...

In the framework of a new money market econometric model, we assess the degree of precision achieved by the European Central Bank ECB) in meeting its operational target for the short-term interest rate and the impact of the U.S. sub-prime credit crisis on the euro money market during the second...

We examine the existence of physical and transition climate risk premia in euro area equity markets. To do so, we develop two novel physical and transition risk indicators, based on text analysis, which are then used to gauge the presence of climate risk premia. Results suggest that climate risk...

One important source of systemic risk can arise from asset commonality among financial institutions. This indirect interconnection may occur when financial institutions invest in similar or correlated assets and it is also described as overlapping portfolios. In this paper, we propose a new...