The current crisis causes numerous economic uncertainties, such as a break-up of the European currency union, and a Greek exit from the euro area to boost the competitiveness by means of devaluation of national currency. When a factor such as exchange rate is expected to have a significant...

While not being widespread, stress tests of credit risk are not new in the Argentine financial system, neither for financial intermediaries nor for the Central Bank. However, they are more often based on rule-of-thumb approaches than on systematic, model based methodologies. The objective of...

As shown in the recent BCBS papers market and credit risks could reinforce each other in certain circumstances, meaning the sum of the parts might be less than an estimate of risk that takes into account the interactions between the two. Market risk factors have an ambiguous impact on the firms'...

In this paper, I use a large set of macroeconomic and financial predictors to forecast U.S. recession periods. I adopt Bayesian methodology with shrinkage in the parameters of the probit model for the binary time series tracking the state of the economy. The in-sample and out-of-sample results...

This paper examines the predictive content of coincident variables for monitoring U.S. recessions in the presence of instabilities. We propose several specifications of a probit model for classifying phases of the business cycle. We find strong evidence in favor of the ones that allow for the...

What matters to economic decision-making is whether the economy has become more or less predictable. People and businesses use information around them to form judgements about what might happen in the future. The rise in uncertainty might be associated with increased concern about extreme...

The Taylor hypothesis is the conjecture that the 2007-2009 financial crisis and the 2008-present downturn have been caused by loose monetary policy during 2002-2006. According to the Taylor hypothesis the Fed deviated from well-know rules of monetary policy-making over this period, and this...

The new Credit Risk Indicator (CRI) based on credit rating migration matrices is introduced. We demonstrate strong correlation between CRI and a number of defaults through several business cycles. The new model for the simulation of the annual number of defaults, based on the 1st quarter CRI...

The aim of this paper is to simulate profit expectations as an emergent property using an agent based model. The paper builds upon adaptive expectations, interactive expectations and small world networks, combining them into a single adaptive interactive profit expectations model (AIE)....

The initiative to capture the information content behind the rise and fall of the business cycle has popularized the study of leading indicators. Many of the foreign experiences shared by economically advanced countries reveal that the leading indicator approach works well as a short-term...