1,721,007 research outputs found
Testing for Government Intertemporal Solvency: A Smooth Transition Error Correction Model Approach
No full textApplied macroeconomists have tested for the government intertemporal solvency condition by either testing for linear stationarity in the total government deficit series or testing for linear cointegration between total government spending and total tax revenues. A number of authors have focused, in particular, on structural breaks in the government deficit process. In this paper, we use a smooth transition error correction model to test and estimate a shift in the adjustment toward a linear cointegration relationship between the government spending to output ratio and the total tax revenues to output ratio. Estimation results show that government authorities react only to large (in absolute value) changes in the government spending to output ratio. Residual diagnostic tests are provided and they show that the model is not misspecified.
Climate risk and investment in equities in Europe: a Panel SVAR approach
No full textIn this study, we use data on European stocks to construct a green-minus-brown portfolio hedging climate risk and to evaluate its performance in terms of cumulative expected and unexpected returns. More specifically, we estimate a Structural Panel VAR fitted to one month return and realized volatility computed for 40 constituents of a green portfolio (i.e., the low carbon emission portfolio monitored by Refinitiv) and for 41 constituents of a brown portfolio (underlying the Oil&Gas and Utilities industry sectors of the STOXX Europe 600). The common shocks underlying the cross-sectional averages, interpreted as portfolio shocks, are retrieved in a first stage of the analysis and they are used to control for cross-sectional dependence. We compute the historical decomposition (for cumulative returns) in a second stage of the analysis and we find, in line with Pástor, L., Stambaugh, R. F., & Taylor, L. A. (2022). Dissecting green returns. Journal of Financial Economics, 146 (2), 403-424, an out-performance of the expected component of the brown portfolio relative to the one for the green portfolio, and an out-performance of the green portfolio when we turn our focus on the unexpected component. We also extend the analysis of Pástor et al. (2022), assessing, for the top 5 constituents of the green portfolio (e.g., those which are found to have the worst performance in terms of expected return), the role played by idiosyncratic shocks in shaping their out-performance in terms of unexpected component. Finally, after exploiting the non-gaussian time series properties of the financial time series considered for the purpose of statistical identification, we are able to interpret ex post the idiosyncratic shocks in terms of financial leverage and risk aversion
Credit demand and supply shocks in Italy during the Great Recession
No full textIn this article, we use Structural VAR analysis to disentangle credit demand and supply shocks and their effect on real economic activity in Italy during the 2008 to 2014 crisis period. The three endogenous variables considered are the loan interest rate, the loans growth rate and the employment to population ratio. The data are observed at annual frequency for each of 103 Italian provinces. The empirical evidence suggests that the variance of the shocks varies across four Italian macro-regions: North, Centre, South and Islands, and hece heteroscedasticity is used to identify (ex ante) the structural shocks. Sign restrictions are used to interpret shocks ex post. The empirical findings suggest a prominent role of credit supply shock in shaping real activity dynamics and also that credit crunch hits the North of Italy less than the remaining macro-regions, especially the South of Italy
Fiscal policy effects on house prices and credit market conditions: empirical evidence from Italian NUTS-2 regional data
No full textWe study the effects of fiscal policy shocks on housing and credit market conditions using a Bayesian Panel Vector Autoregressive model (VAR) fitted to Italian regional data over 2004–2019. The focus on NUTS2 data and the use of time fixed effect allows to treat aggregate shocks as exogenous variable and to focus only on the identification of local government spending and tax shocks. The empirical evidence suggests rising house prices and improvement in access to credit for households due to expansionary fiscal policy. The evidence of a positive effect on house prices and credit market conditions is limited to regions with a higher level of economic and banking sector development. Finally, the empirical evidence points to a counter-cyclical role played by fiscal policy over the Global Financial Crisis period
The Euro and Monetary Policy Transparency
No full textThis paper focuses on a possible explanation for the weakness of the euro, namely the lack of transparency of the European Central Bank's (ECB) monetary policy. In order to obtain a time-varying measure of monetary policy uncertainty in both the U.S. and Euroland, we estimate a Stochastic Volatility model using policy-adjusted short-term interest rates. We also analyze directly the impact of higher uncertainty on the euro-dollar exchange rate. The empirical findings are in line with those of other studies, and show that the U.S. Fed is more transparent than the ECB. This results in higher volatility of European interest rates, capital outflows, and a weaker euro vis-a-vis the U.S. dollar
How do normalization schemes affect net spillovers? A replication of the Diebold and Yilmaz (2012) study
No full textThis paper replicates the Diebold and Yilmaz (2012) study on the connectedness of the commodity market and three other financial markets: the stock market, the bond market, and the FX market, based on the Generalized Forecast Error Variance Decomposition, GEFVD. We show that the net spillover indices (of directional connectedness), used to assess the net contribution of one market to overall risk in the system, are sensitive to the normalization scheme applied to the GEFVD. We show that, considering data generating processes characterized by different degrees of persistence and covariance, a scalar-based normalization of the Generalized Forecast Error Variance Decomposition is preferable to the row normalization suggested by Diebold and Yilmaz since it yields net spillovers free of sign and ranking errors
A stochastic variance factor model for large datasets and an application to S&P data.
No full textThe aim of this paper is to consider multivariate stochastic volatility models for large dimensional datasets. We suggest the use of the principal component methodology of Stock and Watson [Stock, J.H., Watson, M.W., 2002. Macroeconomic forecasting using diffusion indices. Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, 20, 147–162] for the stochastic volatility factor model discussed by Harvey, Ruiz, and Shephard [Harvey, A.C., Ruiz, E., Shephard, N., 1994. Multivariate Stochastic Variance Models. Review of Economic Studies, 61, 247–264]. We provide theoretical and Monte Carlo results on this method and apply it to S&P data
Forecasting industry sector default rates through dynamic factor models
No full textIn this paper we use a reduced form model for the analysis of Portfolio Credit Risk. For this purpose, we fit a Dynamic Factor model, DF, to a large dataset of default rates proxies and macrovariables for Italy. Multi step ahead density and probability forecasts are obtained by employing both the direct and indirect method of prediction together with stochastic simulation of the DF model. We, first, find that the direct method is the best performer regarding the out of sample projection of financial distressful events. In a second stage of the analysis, we find that reduced form Portfolio Credit Risk measures obtained through DF are lower than the one corresponding to the Internal Ratings Based analytic formula suggested by Basel 2. Moreover, the direct method of forecasting gives the smallest Portfolio Credit Risk measures. Finally, when using the indirect method of forecasting, the simulation results suggest that an increase in the number of dynamic factors (for a given number of principal components) increases Portfolio Credit Risk
Does Inflation Targeting Affect the Trade-off Between Output Gap and Inflation Variability?
No full textWe utilize a stochastic volatility model to analyse the possible effects of inflation targeting on the trade–off between output gap variability and inflation variability. We find that the adoption of inflation targets (in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the UK, Sweden and Finland) might result in a more favourable monetary policy trade–off (except in Australia and Finland). This conclusion is reached by comparing, first, the economic performance of targeting countries in the 1980s and the 1990s; and second, the economic performance in the 1990s of targeting and non–targeting countries (the USA, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, France and the Netherlands). We focus on two possible explanations for the performance of the inflation–targeting regime: the relatively high degree of monetary policy transparency, and the presence of a flexible institutional framework
Testing for contagion: a conditional correlation analysis
No full textIn this paper, we test for contagion within the East Asian region, contagion being defined as a significant increase in the degree of comovement between stock returns in different countries. For this purpose, we use a parameter stability test, and, following [Rigobon, R., 2003a. On the measurement of the international propagation of shocks: is the transmission stable?, Journal of International Economics], we control for three types of bias, resulting from heteroscedasticity, endogeneity and omitted variable, respectively. The null of interdependence against the alternative of contagion is then tested as an overidentifying restriction. Unlike other studies, our approach is based on full-sample estimation, and hence avoids the power problems arising from the typical situation of a large “noncrisis” and a small “crisis” sample. We also select endogenously the breakpoints corresponding to the beginning of the contagion period, and finally we impose more plausible restrictions to identify the system. Our findings suggest the existence of contagion within the East Asian region, consistent with crisis-contingent theories of asset market linkages
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