How does heightened uncertainty affect the costs of raising finance through the bond market and through bank loans? Empirically, I find that a rise in uncertainty is accompanied by an increase in corporate bond yields and a decrease in bank lending rates. This new stylized fact can be explained...

We tackle the nowcasting problem at the regional level using a large set of indicators (regional, national and international) for the years 1998 to 2013. We explicitly use the ragged-edge data structure and consider the different information sets faced by a regional forecaster within each...