There is an ongoing trend of deregulation and integration of electricity markets in Europe and North America. This change in market structure has naturally affected the interaction between agents and has contributed to an increasing commoditization of electric power. This paper focuses on one...

This paper studies how the state of the banking sector influences stock returns of nonfinancial firms. We consider a two-factor pricing model, where the first factor is the traditional market excess return and the second factor is the change in the average distance to default of commercial...

This paper investigates the motivations of Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs) to change their ratings, and the consequences of those changes. We propose a new measure of ratings stability that summarizes the information in a ratings transition matrix into a single scalar number. We find that the...

This paper evaluates different models for the short-term forecasting of real GDP growth in ten selected European countries and the euro area as a whole. Purely quarterly models are compared with models designed to exploit early releases of monthly indicators for the nowcast and forecast of...