We use a no-arbitrage essentially affine three-factor model to estimate term premia in US and German ten-year government bond yields. In line with the existing literature, we find that estimated premia have followed a downward trend since the 1980s: from 4.9 per cent in 1981 to 0.7 per cent in...

Aim of this article is to judge the empirical performance of 'ARCH models as diffusion approximations' of models of the short-term rate with stochastic volatility. Our estimation strategy is based both on moment conditions needed to guarantee the convergence of the discrete time models and on...

An important concern for the European Central Bank (ECB), and all central banks alike, is the necessity of making decisions in real time under conditions of great uncertainty about the underlying state of the economy. We address this concern by estimating on real-time data a New Keynesian model...

The ability of a two-sector model to quantify the contribution of the housing market to business fluctuations is investigated using U.S. data and Bayesian methods. The estimated model, which contains nominal and real rigidities and collateral constraints, displays the following features: first,...

In this paper, we exploit the heterogeneity in the forecasts obtained by estimating different factor models to measure forecast uncertainty. Our approach is simple and intuitive. It consists first in selecting all the models that outperform some benchmark model, and then in constructing an...

In this paper we explore the performance of bridge and factor models in forecasting quarterly aggregates in the very short-term subject to a pre-selection of monthly indicators. Starting from a large information set, we select a subset of targeted predictors using data reduction techniques as in...

The prominent role assigned to money by the ECB has been the subject of an intense debate because of the declining predictive power of the monetary aggregate M3 for inflation in recent years. This paper reassesses the information content of monetary analysis for future inflation using dynamic...

A time series model in which the signal is buried in non-Gaussian noise may throw up observations that are outliers when judged by the Gaussian yardstick. We describe an observation-driven model, based on an exponential generalized beta distribution of the second kind (EGB2), in which the signal...

We compare two EGARCH models, which belong to a new class of models in which the dynamics are driven by the score of the conditional distribution of the observations. Models of this kind are called dynamic conditional score (DCS) models and their form facilitates the development of a...