Indicators of Economic Crises : A Data-Driven Clustering Approach

The determination of reliable early-warning indicators of economic crises is a hot topic in economic sciences. Pinning down recurring patterns or combinations of macroeconomic indicators is indispensable for adequate policy adjustments to prevent a looming crisis. We investigate the ability of sever...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Göbel, Maximilian (author)
Other Authors: Araújo, Tanya (author)
Format: workingPaper
Language:eng
Published: 2020
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10400.5/20106
Country:Portugal
Oai:oai:www.repository.utl.pt:10400.5/20106
Description
Summary:The determination of reliable early-warning indicators of economic crises is a hot topic in economic sciences. Pinning down recurring patterns or combinations of macroeconomic indicators is indispensable for adequate policy adjustments to prevent a looming crisis. We investigate the ability of several macroeconomic variables telling crisis countries apart from non-crisis economies. We introduce a selfcalibrated clustering-algorithm, which accounts for both similarity and dissimilarity in macroeconomic fundamentals across countries. Furthermore, imposing a desired community structure, we allow the data to decide by itself, which combination of indicators would have most accurately foreseen the exogeneously defined network topology. We quantitatively evaluate the degree of matching between the data-generated clustering and the desired community-structure.