We investigate the question whether macroeconomic variables contain information about future stock volatility beyond that contained in past volatility. We show that forecasts of GDP and industrial production growth from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Professional Forecasters predict volatility...

We document a substantial increase in downside risk to US economic growth over the last 30 years. By modelling secular trends and cyclical changes of the predictive density of GDP growth, we find an accelerating decline in the skewness of the conditional distributions, with significant,...

We investigate the question of whether macroeconomic variables contain information about future stock volatility beyond that contained in past volatility. We show that forecasts of GDP growth from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Professional Forecasters predict volatility in a cross-section of...

To extend and monitor loans, banks collect detailed and proprietary information about the financial prospects of their customers, many of whom are local businesses and households. Therefore, banks’ loan portfolios contain potentially useful information about local economic conditions. We...

We introduce a novel application of support vector machines (SVM), an important machine learning algorithm, to determine the beginning and end of recessions in real time. Nowcasting, forecasting a condition in the present time because the full information will not be available until later, is...

We study dynamic portfolio choice of a long-horizon investor who uses deep learning methods to predict equity returns when forming optimal portfolios. Our results show statistically and economically significant benefits from using deep learning to form optimal portfolios through certainty...