Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The refereeing process of this paper has been coordinated by a team composed of Gerhard Rünstler, Kalin Nikolov and Bernd Schwaab (all ECB). Terms of use: Documents in EconStor mayThe paper is released in order to make the research of MaRs generally available, in preliminary form, to encourage comments and suggestions prior to final publication. The views expressed in the paper are the ones of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the ECB or of the ESCB. AcknowledgementsWe would like to thank Dafni Giannikou for excellent research assistance. Additionally, thanks are due to Stephen Hall with whom we discussed issues related to the interpretation of the principal components and to Daphne Papadopoulou for discussions on monetary policy implementation. Non-technical summaryThe systemic financial crisis which engulfed the global economy from 2008, along with the subsequent sovereign debt crisis in the euro area, has led to the need to reassess the relationship between financial conditions and real economic activity. Within the context of the Macroprudential Research Network (MaRs), organized by the ESCB, one of the three workstreams is devoted to examining this relationship and the channels through which it operates.A prior question which arises is how exactly financial conditions should be depicted within models. Traditionally, macroeconometric models include only an interest rate. However, during periods of financial stress, changes in interest rates alone may not suffice to capture all the interactions between the financial system and the real economy. Variables such as credit aggregates, survey data reflecting the supply of loans and their terms and conditions, volatility in financial markets and spreads between various assets in different risk classes can all convey additional information on financial conditions and, in turn, influence economic activity through their effect on consumption, savings, investment and exports.In this paper, we seek to construct indices of financial conditions for the euro area and for selected individual euro area countries, which can be used to explore further macro-financial linkages in the economy at large. We construct indices which both exclude and include

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. In this paper we develop a new way of modelling time variation in term premia. This is based on the stochastic discount factor model of asset pricing with observable macroeconomic factors. The joint distribution of excess holding period US bond returns of different maturity and the fundamental macroeconomic factors is modelled using multivariate GARCH with conditional covariances in the mean to capture the term premia. We show how by testing the assumption of no arbitrage we can derive a specification test of our model. We estimate the contribution made to the term premia at different maturities by real and nominal macroeconomic sources of risk. From the estimated term premia we recover the term structure of interest rates and examine how it varies through time. Finally, we examine whether the large number of reported failures of the rational expectations hypothesis of the term structure can be attributed to an omitted time-varying term premium. Terms of use: Documents inJEL Code: C5, E4, G1.

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We explore whether the sensitivity of firm-level investment to cash-flow, typically associated with an external financing premium, is time-varying and in particular whether it varies with overall financial conditions. We find that financial conditions have indeed played a significant role in corporate investment decisions over recent years, rendering financing constraints even more binding. This finding appears to be robust to a number of control variables and robustness tests. Moreover, the impact of credit conditions is not uniform across firms, but rather it varies depending on firm size and leverage, with constrained firms being substantially more likely to condition their investment decisions on overall credit conditions. Our results cast new light on the interplay between financial and real cycle downturns and underline the need for monetary, fiscal and macroprudential policy to be countercyclical with respect to financial conditions.

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