Following Estrella and Hardouvelis (1991) and Estrella and Mishkin (1995a, b), we study the ability of the term structure to predict recessions in eight countries. The results are fourfold. First, the yield curve provides information about the likelihood of future recessions in all countries. Second, term spreads are useful for predicting recessions as much as two years ahead. Third, while German and US spreads are frequently significant in the regressions for the other countries, the added information is limited except in Japan and the United Kingdom. Fourth, while leading indicators contain information beyond that in term spreads, this information is only useful for forecasting recessions in the immediate future. These findings provide further evidence of the potential usefulness of term spreads as indicators for monetary policy purposes.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Bank for International Settlements in its series BIS Working Papers with number
37.
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.