We study the relationship between hours worked and technology during the postwar period in the US. We show that the responses of hours to technological improvements have increased over time, and that the patterns captured by the SVAR are consistent with those obtained from an RBC model with a...

We analyse the likely effects of changes in the monetary and financial regimes of EMU countries on the dynamics of output and inflation. In particular, we evaluate the impact of the regime shift on the forecasting performance of reduced-form models. Data for both the pre-EMU and the EMU regimes...

This paper investigates the identification and dating of the European business cycle, using different methods. We concentrate on methods and statistical series that provides timely and accurate information about the contemporaneous state of the economy in order to provide the reader with a...

Filters used to estimate unobserved components in time series are often designed on a priori grounds, so as to capture the frequencies associated with the component. A limitation of these filters is that they may yield spurious results. The danger can be avoided if the so called ARIMA model...

This paper develops a flexible and computationally efficient model to estimate the credit loss distribution of the loans in a banking system. We consider a sectorial structure, where default frequencies and the total number of loans are allowed to depend on macroeconomic conditions as well as on...

Recent treatments of the issue of a zero floor on nominal interest rates have been subject to some important methodological limitations. These include the assumption of perfect foresight or the introduction of the zero lower bound as an initial condition or a constraint on the variance of the...

This paper proposes the use of dynamic factor models as an alternative to the VAR-based tools for the empirical validation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) theories. Along the lines of Giannone et al. (2006), we use the state-space parameterisation of the factor models proposed...

Modern DSGE models are microfounded and have deep parameters that should be invariant to changes in economic policy, so in principle they are not subject to the Lucas critique. But the literature has already established that misspecification issues also cause parameter instability after policy...

We investigate heterogeneity and spillovers in macro-financial linkages across developed economies, with a particular emphasis on the most recent recession. A panel Bayesian VAR model including real and financial variables identifies a statistically significant common component, which proves to...