This paper investigates the empirical determinants of corporate cash holdings in the euro area as a function of firm size. The results show that there are significant differences in investment in liquid assets for firms of different size. More specifically, liquid assets for smaller firms in the...

We show that an extension of the Markov-switching dynamic factor models that accounts for the specificities of the day to day monitoring of economic developments such as ragged edges, mixed frequencies and data revisions is a good tool to forecast the Euro area recessions in real time. We...

We analyse the impact of government spending shocks on the real effective exchange rate and net exports in the Euro Area within a standard structural VAR framework. We employ a new database that contains quarterly fiscal variables for the Euro Area as a whole. We show that higher government...

The fallout from the 2008 financial crisis has been particularly acute in the euro area Member States of the south-western rim and in the new EU Member States, due to their previously accumulated macroeconomic and financial imbalances. The perception that the euro environment provided a solid...

The recent economic crisis has altered the dynamics of economic series and, as a consequence, introduced uncertainty in seasonal adjustment of recent years. This problem was discussed in recent workshops at the European Central Bank and at Eurostat in the context of adjustment of the Euro Area...

We study the effects that the Maastricht treaty, the creation of the ECB, and the Euro changeover had on the dynamics of European business cycles using a panel VAR and data from ten European countries - seven from the Euro area and three outside of it. There are slow changes in the features of...

In this paper we propose a new real-time forecasting model for euro area GDP growth, D€STINY, which attempts to bridge the existing gap in the literature between large- and small-scale dynamic factor models. By adopting a disaggregated modelling approach, D€STINY uses most of the information...

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we present an up-to-date assessment of the differences across euro area countries in the distributions of various measures of debt conditional on household characteristics. We consider three different outcomes: the probability of holding debt, the amount...