Financial conditions, business cycle fluctuations and growth-at-risk

We augment a quantile vector autoregressive model with the interquartile range of economic growth, a robust proxy for volatility, to assess the relative importance of financial conditions and economic risk in affecting the business cycle. We find that economic risk displays an asymmetric effect on economic growth distribution, very much similar to financial conditions: they substantially increase growth-at-risk, but have limited impact on upside potential. We also document that the asymmetric impact of economic risk depends on the state of the economy and is substantially amplified in times of high economic risk, while remaining subdued in tranquil times.