This book primarily focuses on the dynamic relationship between the financial and the economic systems of twelve major economies in the world.

A financial stress index for the United States is introduced -an index that was used in real time by the staff of the Federal Reserve Board to monitor the financial crisis of 2008-9 and the interaction with real activity, inflation and monetary policy is demonstrated using a richly parameterized Markov-switching VAR model, estimated using Bayesian methods. A "stress event" is defined as a period where the latent Markov states for both shock variances and model coefficients are adverse. Results show that allowing for time variation is economically and statistically important, with solid (quasi) real-time properties. Stress events line up well with financial events in history. A shift to a stress event is highly detrimental to the outlook for the real economy, and conventional monetary policy is relatively weak during such periods.

The U.S financial crises of 2008 highlighted the role of a depressed financial system in causing an economic downturn. This pioneer empirical study develops a financial stress index for the Pakistan economy during 2000-2013. We use key variables that capture unique aspect of stress in the financial system. Principal component analysis technique is used to aggregate the components to a single index. Empirical analysis reveals that banking sector and stock market volatility are the leading contributors to financial stress in Pakistan. The developed financial stress index is then used to trace high episodes of financial stress. Our index was successful in identifying three main financial crises that attacked the financial system including global financial crisis of 2008. Afterwards, the impact of financial stress on real economic activity is examined using impulse response function and Granger causality analysis. We find the expected results as high values of financial stress index are associated with decline in macroeconomic indicators. These findings will provide useful information to readers about the financial and economic dynamics of a developing economy like Pakistan.

This interdisciplinary book argues that the economy has an underlying non-linear structure and that business cycles are endogenous, which allows a greater explanatory power with respect to the traditional assumption that dynamics are stochastic and shocks are exogenous. The first part of this work is formal-methodological and provides the mathematical background needed for the remainder, while the second part presents the view that signal processing involves construction and deconstruction of information and that the efficacy of this process can be measured. The third part focuses on economics and provides the related background and literature on economic dynamics and the fourth part is devoted to new perspectives in understanding nonlinearities in economic dynamics: growth and cycles. By pursuing this approach, the book seeks to (1) determine whether, and if so where, common features exist, (2) discover some hidden features of economic dynamics, and (3) highlight specific indicators of structural changes in time series. Accordingly, it is a must read for everyone interested in a better understanding of economic dynamics, business cycles, econometrics and complex systems, as well as non-linear dynamics and chaos theory.