In modelling macroeconomic time series, often a monthly indicator of global real economic activity is used. We propose a new indicator, named World steel production, and compare it to other existing indicators, precisely the Kilian's index of global real economic activity and the index of OECD...

As financial stability has gained focus in economic policymaking, the demand for analyses of financial stability and the consequences of economic policy has increased. Alternative macroeconomic models are available for policy analyses, and this paper evaluates the usefulness of some models from...

The last 20 years, the importance of a number of behavioral features has been widely accepted within economics, and they are now regularly included in standard macro models. Where has this development led us? I argue that the insights from behavioral economics have led to important progress in...

In an environment where economic structures break, variances change, distributions shift, conventional policies weaken and past events tend to reoccur, economic agents have to form expectations over different regimes. This makes the regime-switching dynamic stochastic general equilibrium...

In the 1870s the three Scandinavian countries Denmark, Norway and Sweden formed the Scandinavian Currency Union. Both the adoption of gold and the monetary union were supposed to lead to price stability in and between these countries. By drawing on new indices of consumer prices the present...

A hybrid inflation/price-level target combines elements of both inflation and price-level targets. The paper derives a hybrid target within a new Keynesian model with inflation persistence due to price indexation. The result generalizes a result by Vestin (2005) that the optimal policy could be...

This paper uses Monte Carlo techniques to address the question: are structural VAR estimates of exchange rate pass-through a useful tool to evaluate macroeconomic models of open economies? The data generating process is a small open economy DSGE model with incomplete pass-through. The results...

A popular macroeconomic forecasting strategy takes combinations across many models to hedge against instabilities of unknown timing; see (among others) Stock and Watson (2004), Clark and McCracken (2010), and Jore et al. (2010). Existing studies of this forecasting strategy exclude Dynamic...

We argue that the next generation of macro modellers at Inflation Targeting central banks should adapt a methodology from the weather forecasting literature known as `ensemble modelling'. In this approach, uncertainty about model specifications (e.g., initial conditions, parameters, and boundary...

In this paper we show analytically, with simulation experiments and with actual data that a mismatch between the time scale of a DSGE model and that of the time series data used for its estimation generally creates identfication problems, introduces estimation bias and distorts the results of...