This paper compares the main findings from the third wave of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) for Malta with those for the euro area. This comparative report finds that in 2016 the median Maltese household held more real and financial assets than households in the euro area....

Over the recent years Malta has experienced a remarkable increase in its labour force due to a large influx of immigrants and an unprecedented increase in the domestic participation. Driven by the observation of such a phenomenon, this paper aims at assessing the impact of foreign and domestic...

In this paper we propose a SVAR identification strategy to disentangle two housing demand shocks and their ensuing effect on consumption. This builds on the literature studying the role of the collateral and housing wealth effects on household behaviour. A mix of zero and sign restrictions...

This paper proposes a sectoral extension to STREAM, the Bank's main macroeconometric model. The extension documented in this paper borrows heavily from linking integration strategies prevalent in literature. The approach utilised here however, differs in two main ways when compared to existing...

Malta's path of economic development benefited from international trade, as the country is situated on trade routes linking Europe, Africa and Asia. This paper aims to look at the country's location, trade agreements, cultural attributes and size in a gravity model framework. Its almost 50 year...

This paper makes use of a novel dataset derived from mortgage contracts granted by the major lending institutions in Malta. This contains information about house prices and a number of important property characteristics. Together with geographic and sociodemographic variables, this information...

This paper studies the distribution of income and wealth in Malta over the period 2010-16, based on three waves of detailed micro-data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey. This is the first paper that explores the evolution of income and wealth inequality jointly, and over time,...

This paper makes use of a novel dataset derived from mortgage contracts granted by the major lending institutions in Malta. This contains information about house prices and a number of important property characteristics. Together with geographic and sociodemographic variables, this information...

This paper assesses and forecasts the probability of deflation in the EA at different horizons using a binomial probit model. The best predictors are selected among more than one-hundred variables adopting a two-step combinatoric approach and exploiting parallel computation in Julia language....

Macroprudential policy is pre-emptive, aimed at preventing crises. Empirical evidence hints at the existence of asymmetric policy in booms and recessions. This paper uses a New Keynesian model with a financial friction on mortgage borrowing and collateral to show what implications this asymmetry...