Using the recent EC Commission report `One Market, One Money' as a point of reference, we consider the merits of a single currency in Europe. The main benefit is the reduction in transaction costs, which the report estimates at 0.4% of European Community (EC) GDP (but much less in countries with...

The EMS's robustness in the face of stochastic shocks is studied, using the Liverpool World Model and the optimal strategy algorithm of Brandsma and Hughes Hallett. The EMS began life in 1979 with a system design permitting regular parity changes; we find this design to be relatively unstable,...

Unlike economies as a whole, manufacturing industries exhibit unconditional convergence in labor productivity. The paper documents this finding for 4-digit manufacturing sectors for a large group of developed and developing countries over the period since 1990. The coefficient of unconditional...

We propose a new approach to forecasting the term structure of interest rates, which allows to efficiently extract the information contained in a large panel of yields. In particular, we use a large Bayesian Vector Autoregression (BVAR) with an optimal amount of shrinkage towards univariate AR...

Measuring and displaying uncertainty around path-forecasts, i.e. forecasts made in period T about the expected trajectory of a random variable in periods T+1 to T+H is a key ingredient for decision making under uncertainty. The probabilistic assessment about the set of possible trajectories that...

This paper provides real time evidence on the usefulness of the euro area output gap as a leading indicator for inflation and growth. A genuine real-time data set for the euro area is used, including vintages of several alternative gap estimates. It turns out that, despite some difference across...

This paper analyses the use of factor analysis for instrumental variable estimation when the number of instruments tends to infinity. In particular, we focus on situations where many weak instruments exist and/or the factor structure is weak. Theoretical results, simulation experiments and...

As a generalization of the factor-augmented VAR (FAVAR) and of the Error Correction Model (ECM), Banerjee and Marcellino (2009) introduced the Factor-augmented Error Correction Model (FECM). The FECM combines error-correction, cointegration and dynamic factor models, and has several conceptual...

This paper provides evidence on the reliability of euro area real-time output gap estimates, including those provided by the IMF, OECD and EC and a set of model based measures. A genuine real-time data set is used, including vintages of several sets of euro area output gap estimates available...

This paper contributes to the literature on the changing transmission mechanism of monetary policy by introducing a model whose parameter evolution explicitly depends on the conduct of monetary policy. We find that the model fits the data well, in particular when complemented with an estimated...