Search Results
Working Paper
Optimizing Credit Gaps for Predicting Financial Crises: Modelling Choices and Tradeoffs
Credit gaps are good predictors for financial crises, and banking regulators recommend using them to inform countercyclical capital buffers for banks. Researchers typically create credit gap measures using trend-cycle decomposition methods, which require many modelling choices, such as the method used, and the smoothness of the underlying trend. Other choices hinge on the tradeoffs implicit in how gaps are used as early warning indicators (EWIs) for predicting crises, such as the preference over false positives and false negatives. We evaluate how the performance of credit-gap-based EWIs for ...
Working Paper
What is Certain about Uncertainty?
Researchers, policymakers, and market participants have become increasingly focused on the effects of uncertainty and risk on financial market and economic outcomes. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the many existing measures of risk, uncertainty, and volatility. It summarizes what these measures capture, how they are constructed, and their effects, paying particular attention to large uncertainty spikes, such as those appearing concurrently with the outbreak of COVID-19. The measures are divided into three types: (1) news-based, survey- based, and econometric; (2) asset market ...
Working Paper
SONOMA: a Small Open ecoNOmy for MAcrofinance
We develop a new small open economy model (SONOMA) in which domestic corporate debt and equities are affected by shocks to both external credit and equity markets. In a novel empirical analysis of several small-but-developed economies, we show that both external debt and equity shocks are important determinants of domestic economic fluctuations, corporate leverage, and net foreign asset positions. SONOMA replicates our empirical facts about asset prices, financial flows, and economic activity.
Discussion Paper
The Third SNB-FRB-BIS High-Level Conference on Global Risk, Uncertainty, and Volatility: Monetary Policy and Banking Regulation under Elevated Uncertainty
The Swiss National Bank (SNB), the Division of International Finance of the Federal Reserve Board (FRB), and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) jointly organized the third High-Level Conference on Global Risk, Uncertainty, and Volatility on November 14 and 15 of 2023. The conference brought academics and policymakers together to discuss the many sources of risk and uncertainty under which monetary policymakers and bank regulators operate, recent advances in measuring the multi-faceted nature of uncertainty, and how policymakers respond to these challenges.
Discussion Paper
Non-Financial Corporate Credit and Recessions
The global financial crisis of 2008-09 (GFC) followed an extended period of growth in non-financial corporate (NFC) sector debt. NFC corporate debt resumed its climb a few years after the GFC, and the pace of growth picked up in 2020, as firms took on debt to cover revenue lost during the pandemic or to build up precautionary liquidity buffers.
Working Paper
The Impact of Financial Sanctions: The Case of Iran 2011-2016
This study provides a detailed analysis of the impact of financial sanctions on publicly traded companies. We consider the effect of imposing and lifting sanctions on the target country's traded equities and examine the differences in the reaction of politically connected firms and those without such connections. The paper focuses on Iran due to (1) its sizable financial markets, (2) imposition of sanctions of varying severity and duration on private and state-owned companies, (3) the significant presence of politically connected firms in the stock market, and (4) the unique event of the 2015 ...