The ECB objective of price stability is given a quantitative content as a year-on-year growth rate in the euro area HICP close but below 2% over the medium term. While this objective is referred to area-wide price developments, in anticipating monetary policy moves, market analysts pay...

Quantile aggregation (or 'Vincentization') is a simple and intuitive way of combining probability distributions, originally proposed by S. B. Vincent in 1912. In certain cases, such as under Gaussianity, the Vincentized distribution belongs to the same family as that of the individual...

Assessing the global economic outlook is a fundamentally important task of international financial institutions, governments and central banks. In this paper we focus on the consequences of the rapid growth of emerging markets for monitoring and forecasting the global outlook. Our main results...

The size and power properties of several tests of equal Mean Square Prediction Error (MSPE) and of Forecast Encompassing (FE) are evaluated, using Monte Carlo simulations, in the context of dynamic regressions. For nested models, the F-type test of forecast encompassing proposed by Clark and...

This paper considers forecasting by econometric and time series models using preliminary (or provisional) data. The standard practice is to ignore the distinction between provisional and final data. We call the forecasts that ignore such a distinction naive forecasts, which are generated as...

This paper proposes an index of core inflation for the euro area which exploits information from a large panel of time series on disaggregated prices, industrial production, labor market indicators, financial and monetary variables. The index is the result of a smoothing operation at both the...