This paper studies the informational content of the slope of the yield curve as a predictor of recessions in the euro area and provides evidence of the potential usefulness of this indicator for monetary policy purposes. In particular, the historical predictive power of ten variations of yield...

Against the background of the rapid inter- and intra-regional integration of East Asia, we examine the extent and nature of synchronisation of business cycles in the region. We estimate a dynamic common factor model for output growth of 10 East Asian countries. A significant common factor is...

This paper studies the performance of U.S. taxable bond mutual funds employing a novel data set of portfolio weights. Active fund managers exhibit outperformance before costs and fees generating, on average, gross returns of 1% per annum over the benchmark portfolio constructed using past...

This paper examines newly-available intra-day data from the inter-dealer government bond market to investigate the effects of economic-news announcements on prices, trading volume, and bid-ask spreads. The use of intra-day price data together with data on market expectations allows us to obtain...

We consider two formulations of the linear factor model (LFM) with nontraded factors. In the first formulation, LFM, risk premia and alphas are estimated by a cross-sectional regression of average returns on betas. In the second formulation, LFM*, the factors are replaced by their projections on...

We test whether adverse changes to banks' market valuations during the financial and sovereign debt crises, and the associated increase in banks' cost of funding, affected firms' real decisions. Using new data linking over 3,000 non-financial Italian firms to their bank(s), we find that...