A financial conditions index (FCI) is designed to summarise the state of financial markets. We construct two with UK data. The first is the first principal component (PC) of a set of financial indicators. The second comes from a new approach taking information from a large set of macroeconomic...

In this paper we introduce a non-parametric estimation method for a large Vector Autoregression (VAR) with time-varying parameters. The estimators and their asymptotic distributions are available in closed form. This makes the method computationally efficient and capable of handling information...

We re-examine the great ratios associated with balanced growth models and ask whether they have remained constant over time. We first use a benchmark DSGE model to explore how plausible smooth variations in structural parameters lead to movements in great ratios that are comparable to those seen...

We propose a new approach to forecasting the term structure of interest rates, which allows to efficiently extract the information contained in a large panel of yields. In particular, we use a large Bayesian Vector Autoregression (BVAR) with an optimal amount of shrinkage towards univariate AR...