This paper uses a data-set including time series data on macroeconomic variables, loans, deposits and interest rates for the euro area in order to study the features of financial intermediation over the business cycle. We find that stylized facts for aggregate monetary and real variables are...

This paper shows that the EMU has not affected historical characteristics of member countries’ business cycles and their cross-correlations. Member countries which had similar levels of GDP per-capita in the seventies have also experienced similar business cycles since then and no significant...

This Paper proposes a new framework to analyse systematic and unsystematic monetary policy within the same econometric model. As in Bernanke and Boivin, 2001, the model aims at capturing the following facts: monetary authorities use information from a large number of data series to extract a...

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, labour market indicators, financial and monetary variables. The index is the result of a smoothing operation at both the...

This paper describes the way in which the European Central Bank (ECB), the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England conducted monetary policy since the beginning of the financial crisis, in August 2007. We argue that both quantitative easing - and the other non-standard measures introduced by...

This paper evaluates models that exploit timely monthly releases to compute early estimates of current quarter GDP (now-casting) in the euro area. We compare traditional methods used at institutions with a new method proposed by Giannone, Reichlin and Small, 2005. The method consists in bridging...

This paper formalizes the process of updating the nowcast and forecast on output and inflation as new releases of data become available. The marginal contribution of a particular release for the value of the signal and its precision is evaluated by computing 'news' on the basis of an evolving...

We analyse the panel of the Greenbook forecasts (sample 1970-96) and a large panel of monthly variables for the US (sample 1970-2003) and show that the bulk of dynamics of both the variables and their forecasts is explained by two shocks. Moreover, a two factor model which exploits, in real...

The paper is a narrative on monetary policy and the banking sector during the two recent euro area recessions. It shows that while in the two episodes of recession and financial stress the ECB acted aggressively providing liquidity to banks, the second recession, unlike the first, has been...