This paper conducts a real-time, out-of-sample analysis of the forecasting power of various aggregate financial intermediaries' balance sheets to a wide range of economic activity measures in the United States. I find evidence that the balance sheets of leveraged financial institutions do have...

Using the Baker et al. (2013) index of policy uncertainty for six developed countries, this paper estimates spillovers of policy uncertainty. We find that spillovers account for slightly more than one-fourth of the dynamics of policy uncertainty in these countries, with this share rising to...

We analyze the evolution of macroeconomic uncertainty in the United States, based on the forecast errors of consensus survey forecasts of different economic indicators. Comprehensive information contained in the survey forecasts enables us to capture a realtime subjective measure of uncertainty...

This paper analyzes the implications of the global financial cycle for conventional and unconventional monetary policies and macroprudential policy in small, open economies such as Canada. The paper starts by summarizing recent work on financial cycles and their growing correlation across...

We study the revision properties of the Bank of Canada's staff output gap estimates since the mid-1980s. Our results suggest that the average staff output gap revision has decreased significantly over the past 15 years, in line with recent evidence for the U.S. Alternatively, revisions from...