Entering a currency union without any political union European countries have taken a gamble: will the needs of the currency union force a political integration (as anticipated by Monnet) or will the tensions create a backlash, as suggested by Kaldor, Friedman and many others? We try to answer...

We design a new, implementable capital requirement for large financial institutions (LFIs) that are too big to fail. Our mechanism mimics the operation of margin accounts. To ensure that LFIs do not default on either their deposits or their derivative contracts, we require that they maintain a...

We study an economy where the lack of a simultaneous double coincidence of wants creates the need for a relatively safe asset (money). We show that, even in the absence of asymmetric information or an agency problem, the private provision of liquidity is inefficient. The reason is that liquidity...

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...