Credit ratings have assumed an increasingly formidable and important role over the years. An increased role and revisions to its foundations, have been triggered, not only in view of the shortcomings of credit ratings based criteria, as revealed through the recent Financial Crisis, but also the...

Countries in which inflation targeting has been adopted require high quality inflation forecasts. The Polish National Bank adopted a variant of implicit inflation targeting and therefore the ability to forecast inflation is critically important to policy makers. Since the domestic price...

Several studies have established the predictive power of the yield curve, ie: the difference between long and short term bond rates, in terms of real economic activity, for the U.S. and various European countries. In this paper we use data from the European Union (EU15), ranging from 1994:Q1 to...

Using micro data on non-financial listed companies in Pakistan, over the period of 2000-2010, this paper emphasizes over the impact of monetary policy on economic growth through balance sheet channel. At first step, monetary tightening deteriorates the net worth of the firms and leads to cash...

This paper re-examines the out-of-sample predictive power of interest rate spreads when the short-term nominal rates have been stuck at the zero lower bound and the Fed has used unconventional monetary policy. Our results suggest that the predictive power of some interest rate spreads have...

We re-estimate statistical properties and predictive power of a set of Phillips curves, which are expressed as linear and lagged relationships between the rates of inflation, unemployment, and change in labour force. For France, several relationships were estimated eight years ago. The change...

We model the rate of inflation and unemployment in Austria since the early 1960s within the Phillips/Fisher framework. The change in labour force is the driving force representing economic activity in the Phillips curve. For Austria, this macroeconomic variable was first tested as a predictor of...