I measure the parameters of coin wear using data collected in the 19th century. A comparison across denominations and countries shows that coin wear (in relative terms) is linear in the logarithm of coin value. Data from coin hoards of the 18th and early 19th centuries yield similar estimates of...

The current financial crisis offers a unique opportunity to investigate the leading properties of market indicators in a stressed environment and their usefulness from a banking supervision perspective. One pool of relevant information that has been little explored in the empirical literature is...

We propose a new filtering and smoothing technique for non-linear state-space models. Observed variables are quadratic functions of latent factors following a Gaussian VAR. Stacking the vector of factors with its vectorized outer-product, we form an augmented state vector whose first two...

We consider the VaR associated with the global loss generated by a set risk sources. We propose a sequence of simple models incorporating progressively the notions of contagion due to instantaneous correlations, of serial correlation, of evolution of the instantaneous correlations, of volatility...

Among several concepts encompassed by the idea of an equilibrium rate of unemployment (labour mismatch, unemployment trend, non inflationary unemployment, structural unemployment), the NAIRU appears as the most interesting one for a central bank since it focuses directly on inflation. Thus, the...

We estimate the reaction function of monetary policy in the Euro area and derive the Taylor-type policy rule that a would-be ECB would have followed since the beginning of the European Monetary System (1979-2003). We first follow the standard GMM methodology developed by Clarida, Galí and...

In this article we estimate a time-varying " natural " rate of interest (TVNRI) for a synthetic euro area over the period 1979Q1-2002Q4 using a small backward-looking macroeconomic model, broadly following a methodology developed by Laubach and Williams (2003) for the United States. The Kalman...