The available empirical evidence suggests that non-negligible differences in economic structures persist among euro area countries. Because of these asymmetries, an area-wide modelling approach is arguably less reliable, from a strictly statistical viewpoint, than a multi-country one. This paper...

Although the concept of core inflation is apparently well defined and intuitively appealing, its practical usefulness has often been questioned on at least two accounts: first, existing core inflation measures are by and large exclusively based on statistical criteria and thus lack a firm...

It has increasingly become standard practice to supplement point macroeconomic forecasts with an appraisal of the degree of uncertainty and the prevailing direction of risks. Several alternative approaches have been proposed in the literature to compute the probability distribution of...

We probe the scope for reacting to house prices in simple and implementable monetary policy rules, using a New Keynesian model with a housing sector and financial frictions on the household side. We show that the social welfare maximizing monetary policy rule features a reaction to house price...

Using a simple multi-country econometric model covering the three main countries of the euro area, the paper focuses on the role that can be played by information at the national level in defining the monetary policy of the Union. We find that the performance of a central bank that chooses the...