This paper examines the reasons for the declining path of inflation since the 1970s. In particular, it focusses on the role of globalization - covering both changes in the global market structure and technical and structural developments in trade and production. In addition, the paper deals with...

This paper evaluates the quality of survey forecasts, their accuracy and unbiasedness, and their overall consistency. The paper also tries to find out whether the relationships between economic variables are the same in survey data and in the actual data. In other words we analyze whether the...

This paper studies professional forecasts on a micro level using three alternative data sets. The analysis is mainly based on the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasts for the euro area, but for comparison, Consensus Economics survey and the Survey of Professional Forecasts for the US are also...

It has been argued that one advantage of EMU in the EU has been an improvement in the credibility of monetary policy. This paper provides a new way of assessing the credibility of monetary policy by analyzing the dispersion of inflation-unemployment observations over time. In this way, we may...

Short answer: It helps a lot when other important variables are excluded from the information set. Longer answer: We revisit claims in the literature that money growth is Granger-causal for inflation at low frequencies. Applying frequency-specific tests in a comprehensive system setup for...

We apply a structural dynamic factor model to a large quarterly dataset covering 38 countries between 2002 and 2011 to analyze China’s role in global inflation dynamics. We identify Chinese supply and demand shocks and examine their contributions to global price dynamics and the transmission...

In many forward-looking macroeconomic models, such as the New Keynesian model, firms' expectations about the future play a key role in determining outcomes today. We examine this hypothesis using a novel panel dataset on firms actual and expected price changes collected by the Confederation of...

This paper examines the relationship between the output gap and inflation in Japan by estimating Phillips curves and testing for changes since the advent of low inflation and/or the stabilisation of the rate of change of inflation. The work provides empirical support for the hypothesis of a...

In recent years, inflation in the euro area has failed to decelerate decisively while cyclical slack built up in the economy. Is this phenomenon more than a peculiarity in recent data? Is it related to structural policy settings? Econometric analysis conducted on two decades of quarterly data...

This paper analyses the determinants of structural unemployment rates in a two-stage approach. First, time-varying NAIRUs are estimated for a panel of OECD economies on the basis of Phillips curve equations using Kalman filter techniques. In a second stage, the estimated NAIRUs are regressed on...