Despite its stability over time, as for any statistical relationship, Okun's law is subject to deviations that can be large at times. In this paper, we provide a mapping between residuals in Okun's regressions and structural shocks identified using a SVAR model by inspecting how unemployment...

We propose a multicountry quantile factor augmeneted vector autoregression (QFAVAR) to model heterogeneities both across countries and across characteristics of the distributions of macroeconomic time series. The presence of quantile factors allows for summarizing these two heterogeneities in a...

This article surveys both earlier and recent research on recession forecasting with probit based time series models. Most studies use either a static probit model or its extensions in order toestimate the recession probabilities, while others use models based on a latent variable ap-proach to...

We construct a new indicator of de facto financial integration in the EU. The resulting indicator is pro-cyclical as it evolves along the cyclical pattern of economic activity in the European Union. It is then appended to a set of relevant financial and macroeconomic variables, within a FAVAR...

Financial shocks generate a protracted and quantitatively important effect on real economic activity and financial markets only if the shocks are both negative and large. Otherwise, their role is quite modest. Financial shocks have become more important for economic fluctuations after the 2000...

The output gap is a commonly used tool to assess the state of the business cycle, and as such, a key input for policy makers. In this article, we employ principal components analysis (PCA) to derive an estimate of the output gap in Finland that summarizes the information of widely used cyclical...