Dating systemic financial stress episodes in the EU countries

This paper introduces a new methodology to date systemic financial stress events in a transparent, objective and reproducible way. The financial cycle is captured by a monthly Country-Level Index of Financial Stress (CLIFS). Based on two Markov-switching and one threshold vector autoregressive model, information from the CLIFS and industrial production are combined to identify those episodes of financial market stress that are associated with a substantial negative impact on the real economy. By applying this framework to 27 European Union countries, the paper is a first attempt to provide a chronology of systemic financial stress episodes as a complement to the expert-detected events that are currently available.