We study the effects of credit over the business cycle, distinguishing between expansions and contractions. We find that there is a growth and risk trade-off in the pace of credit growth over the business cycle. While rapid credit growth tends to be followed by deeper recessions, we also find...

To analyze the international transmission of business cycle fluctuations, we propose a new multilevel dynamic factor model with a block structure that (i) does not restrict the factors to being orthogonal and (ii) mixes data sampled at quarterly and monthly frequencies. By means of Monte Carlo...

This paper develops a novel indicator of global economic activity, the GEA Tracker, which is based on commodity prices selected recursively through a genetic algorithm. The GEA Tracker allows for daily real-time knowledge of international business conditions using a minimum amount of...

Since the global financial crises, many countries have implemented macroprudential policies with the aim to render the financial system more resilient to shocks and limit the procyclicality of the financial system. We present theoretical and empirical evidence on the effectiveness of...

We analyze the dynamic interactions between commodity prices and output growth of the seven greatest exporters Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela. Using a novel definition of Markov-switching impulse response functions, we find that the...

We develop a twofold analysis of how the information provided by several economic indicators can be used in Markov-switching dynamic factor models to identify the business cycle turning points. First, we compare the performance of a fully non- linear multivariate specification (one-step...

We examine the short-term performance of two alternative approaches of forecasting from dynamic factor models. The first approach extracts the seasonal component of the individual indicators before estimating the dynamic factor model, while the alternative uses the non seasonally adjusted data...

We extend the Markov-switching dynamic factor model to account for some of the specificities of the day-to-day monitoring of economic developments from macroeconomic indicators, such as ragged edges and mixed frequencies. We examine the theoretical benefits of this extension and corroborate the...