Intro -- Contents -- I. MARKET-BASED DEFAULT PROBABILITIES AND FINANCIAL SURVEILLANCE -- II. CREDIT DEFAULT SWAPS -- III. BONDS -- IV. EQUITY PRICES -- V. FROM RISK-NEUTRAL PROBABILITIES TO REAL-WORLD PROBABILITIES -- VI. CONCLUSIONS -- REFERENCES.

We present a simple macroeconomic model with a continuum of primary commodities used in the production of the final good, such that the real prices of commodities have a factor structure. One factor captures the combined contribution of all aggregate shocks which have no direct effects on...

This paper shows that the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm for regime-switching dynamic factor models provides satisfactory performance relative to other estimation methods and delivers a good trade-off between accuracy and speed, which makes it especially useful for large dimensional...

This paper develops a new approach to estimating the degree of informality in an economy. It combines direct yet infrequent measures of the informal economy in micro data with an augmented factor model that links macro indicators of the informal economy to its causes. We show that the prevailing...

While the level of disparities across regions in 10 advanced European economies studied in this paper mostly reflects productivity gaps, the increase since the Great Recession has resulted from diverging unemployment rates. Following the pandemic, this could be further exacerbated given...

This paper constructs a financial conditions index for Poland to explore the link between financial conditions and real economic activity. The index in constructed by applying two complementary approaches—factor analysis and vector auto-regression approach. We evaluate the index’s...

This paper analyzes the transmission of shocks and policies among and across the Nordic economies and the rest of the world. This spillover analysis is based on a pair of estimated structural macroeconometric models of the world economy, disaggregated into thirty five national economies. We find...

This paper develops a small open economy dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model with macrofinancial linkages. The model includes a financial accelerator--entrepreneurs are assumed to partially finance investment using domestic and foreign currency debt--to assess the importance of...

We analyze the performance of kernel density methods applied to grouped data to estimate poverty (as applied in Sala-i-Martin, 2006, QJE). Using Monte Carlo simulations and household surveys, we find that the technique gives rise to biases in poverty estimates, the sign and magnitude of which...