This paper exploits a quarterly panel data set for 16 OECD countries over the period 1975q1-2013q2 to explore the importance of house prices and credit in affecting the likelihood of a financial crisis. Estimating a set of multivariate logit models, we find that booms in credit to both...

This paper analyzes the cost-benefit trade-off of leaning against the wind (LAW) in monetary policy. Our starting point is a New Keynesian Markov-switching model where the economy can be in a normal state or in a crisis state. The set-up enables us to weigh benefits against costs for different...

Vector autoregression (VAR) models are widely used for policy analysis. Some authors caution, however, that the forecast errors of the federal funds rate from such a VAR are large compared to those from the federal funds futures market. From these findings, it is argued that the inaccurate...

The paper describes a relative entropy procedure for imposing moment restrictions on simulated forecast distributions from a variety of models. Starting from an empirical forecast distribution for some variables of interest, the technique generates a new empirical distribution that satisfies a...