Incorporating financial development indicators into early warning systems

Abstract

We set up an early warning system for financial crises based on the Random Forrest approach. We use a novel set of predictors that comprises financial development indicators in addition to conventional imbalances measures. The evaluation of the model is conducted using a three-step procedure (i.e. training, validation and testing sub-samples). The results indicate that combining financial imbalances and financial development indicators helps to improve the out-of-sample accuracy of the early warning system.