Financial stress and economic activity in Germany and the Euro Area

Björn van Roye

No 1743, Kiel Working Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel)

Abstract: The financial crisis 2008-2009 and the European sovereign debt crisis have shown that stress on financial markets is important for analyzing and forecasting economic activity. Since financial stress is not directly observable but is presumably reflected in many financial market variables, it is useful to derive an indicator summarizing the stress component of these variables. Therefore, I derive a financial market stress indicator (FMSI) for Germany and the Euro Area using a dynamic approximate factor model. Subsequently, applying these indicators, I analyse the effects of financial stress on economic activity in a small Bayesian VAR model. An increase in financial stress leads to a significant dampening of GDP growth and the inflation rate. Additionally, there is a substantial and persistent decline in short-term nominal interest rates. I find that about fifteen percent of variation in real GDP growth can be accounted for variations in financial stress for Germany and about 30 percent in the Euro Area. I show that the inclusion of the indicator significantly improves out-of-sample forecasting accuracy for real GDP growth in Germany compared to a model without the indicator and other forecast benchmarks.

Keywords: forecasting; financial stress indicator; financial systems; recessions; slowdowns; financial crises (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E5 E6 F3 G14 G2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/53149/1/679405372.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:ifwkwp:1743

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Kiel Working Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().