We evaluate the role of financial conditions as predictors of macroeconomic risk first in the quantile regression framework of Adrian et al. (2019b), which allows for non-linearities, and then in a novel linear semi-structural model as proposed by Hasenzagl et al. (2018). We distinguish between...

The chapter deals with parametric models for the measurement of the business cycle in economic time series. It presents univariate methods based on parametric trend - cycle decompositions and multivariate models featuring a Phillips type relationship between the output gap and inflation and the...

We introduce a structural quantile vector autoregressive (VAR) model. Unlike standard VAR which models only the average interaction of the endogenous variables, quantile VAR models their interaction at any quantile. We show how to estimate and forecast multivariate quantiles within a recursive...

This paper proposes an econometric model of the joint dynamic relationship between the yield curve and the economy to predict business cycles. We examine the predictive value of the yield curve to forecast both future economic growth as well as the beginning and end of economic recessions at the...

In the past twenty years, measures of economic uncertainty have been developed that are either purely market price-based, structural model-based using data on real fundamentals and asset prices, text-based, or survey-based. We compare the performance of these uncertainty measures in forecasting...

This paper introduces new weighting schemes for model averaging when one is interested in combining discrete forecasts from competing Markov-switching models. In particular, we extend two existing classes of combination schemes - Bayesian (static) model averaging and dynamic model averaging - so...

We forecast recessions in Canada using an autoregressive (AR) probit model. In this model, the presence of the lagged latent variable, which captures the autocorrelation in the recession binary variable, results in an intractable likelihood with a high dimensional integral. Therefore, we employ...

What are the effects of beliefs, sentiment, and uncertainty, over the business cycle? To answer this question, we develop a behavioral New Keynesian macroeconomic model, in which we relax the assumption of rational expectations. Agents are, instead, boundedly rational: they have a...

The VIX index and the spread between long- and short-term Treasury bond yields co-move in counterclockwise cycles that align with the business cycle. Based on this empirical fact, I predict U.S. recessions using an indicator of the economy’s location on the VIX-yield-curve cycle. The proposed...

Big technological improvements in a new, secondary sector lead to a period of excitement about the future prospects of the overall economy, generating boom-bust dynamics propagating through credit markets. Increased future capital prices relax collateral constraints today, leading to a boom...