Financial cycles can be important drivers of real activity, but there is scant evidence about how well they signal recession risks. We run a horse race between the term spread - the most widely used indicator in the literature - and a range of financial cycle measures. Unlike most papers, ours...

This paper investigates why the slope of the yield curve predicts future economic activity in Germany and the United States. A structural VAR is used to identify aggregate supply, aggregate demand, monetary policy and inflation scare shocks and to analyze their effects on the real, nominal and...

House prices generally depend on inflation, the yield curve and bank credit, but national differences in the mortgage markets also matter. House prices are more sensitive to short-term rates where floating rate mortgages are more widely used and more aggressive lending practices are associated...

There has been mounting evidence that the inflation process has been changing. Inflation is now much lower and much more stable around the globe. And its sensitivity to measures of economic slack and increases in input costs appears to have declined. Probably the most widely supported...

Greater international economic interconnectedness over recent decades has been changing inflation dynamics. This paper presents evidence that the expansion of global value chains (GVCs), ie cross-border trade in intermediate goods and services, is an important channel through which global...