Indicator Of Real Activity Research Articles

SRISK: A Conditional Capital Shortfall Measure of Systemic Risk

We introduce SRISK to measure the systemic risk contribution of a financial firm. SRISK measures the capital shortfall of a firm conditional on a severe market decline, and is a function of its size, leverage and risk. We use the measure to study top US financial institutions in the recent financial crisis. SRISK delivers useful rankings of systemic institutions at various stages of the crisis and identifies Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Morgan Stanley, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers as top contributors as early as 2005-Q1. Moreover, aggregate SRISK provides early warning signals of distress in indicators of real activity. JEL Classification: C22, C23, C53, G01, G20

Macro Factors in the Term Structure of Credit Spreads

We estimate arbitrage-free term structure models of US Treasury yields and spreads on BBB and Brated corporate bonds in a doubly-stochastic intensity-based framework. A novel feature of our analysis is the inclusion of macroeconomic variables - indicators of real activity, inflation and financial conditions - as well as latent factors, as drivers of term structure dynamics. Our results point to three key roles played by macro factors in the term structure of spreads: they have a significant impact on the level, and particularly the slope, of the curves; they are largely responsible for variation in the prices of systematic risk; and speculative grade spreads exhibit greater sensitivity to macro shocks than high grade spreads. In addition to estimating risk-neutral default intensities, we provide estimates of physical default intensities using data on Moody's KMV EDFs™ as a forward-looking proxy for default risk. We find that the real and financial activity indicators, along with filtered estimates of the latent factors from our term structure model, explain a large portion of the variation in EDFs™ across time. Furthermore, measures of the price of default event risk implied by estimates of physical and risk-neutral intensities indicate that compensation for default event risk is countercyclical, varies widely across the cycle, and is higher on average and more variable for higher-rated bonds.

The Use of Financial Spreads as Indicator Variables: Evidence for the United Kingdom and Germany

There has been growing interest in the use of financial spreads as advance indicators of real activity and inflation. Empirical evidence is marshalled on a range of spreads when these are used in vector autoregressive models of the U.K. and German economies. It is found that they do provide significant information, even after allowing for the effects of other influences upon macroeconomic activity.