This Paper develops a test of contagion in financial markets based on bivariate correlation analysis, which generalizes existing tests, and applies it to the international effects of the Hong Kong stock market crisis of October 1997. Contagion is defined as a structural break in the...

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 presents ideas and methods underlying the construction of an indicator that tracks euro area GDP growth but, unlike GDP growth, (i) is updated monthly and almost in real time, and (ii) is free from short-run dynamics. Removal of short-run dynamics from a time series to isolate the...

This Paper is the result of the Bank of Italy-CEPR project to construct a monthly coincident indicator of the business cycle of the euro area. The index is estimated on the basis of a harmonized data set of monthly statistics of the euro area (951 series) which we constructed from a variety of...