Economic vulnerability is state dependent

This paper shows that different states of the financial system command a different effect in worsening financial conditions on economic vulnerability. As soon as financial conditions start deteriorating, the economic outlook becomes more pessimistic and uncertain. No increase in macroeconomic uncertainty is expected when financial conditions worsen from an already tighter than usual situation. We also find that past information on GDP growth is paramount to study and predict economic vulnerability. Both these findings have relevant forecasting and policymaking implications, and persist once we consider other measures of the real economic activity. From a methodological perspective, we carry out the analysis under a novel approach which relies on the state of the art in dynamic modelling of multiple quantiles. The proposed methodology exploits the entire information of past GDP growth, can accommodate a state dependent effect of financial conditions and allows for statistical inference under the standard quasi maximum likelihood setting.