This paper studies the cyclical properties of real GDP, house prices, credit, and nominal liquid financial assets in 17 EU countries, by applying several methods to extract cycles. The estimates confirm earlier findings of large medium-term cycles in credit volumes and house prices. GDP appears...

The Consumer Expectations Survey (CES) is an important new tool for analysing euro area household economic behaviour and expectations. This new survey covers a range of important topical areas including consumption and income, inflation and gross domestic product (GDP) growth, the labour market,...

This report discusses the role of the European Union’s full employment objective in the conduct of the ECB’s monetary policy. It first reviews a range of indicators of full employment, highlights the heterogeneity of labour market outcomes within different groups in the population and across...

The ECB’s price stability mandate has been defined by the Treaty. But the Treaty has not spelled out what price stability precisely means. To make the mandate operational, the Governing Council has provided a quantitative definition in 1998 and a clarification in 2003. The landscape has...

This paper examines the importance of central bank communication in ensuring the effectiveness of monetary policy and in underpinning the credibility, accountability and legitimacy of independent central banks. It documents how communication has become a monetary policy tool in itself; one...

This paper provides an assessment of the macroeconomic models regularly used for forecasting and policy analysis in the Eurosystem. These include semi-structural, structural and time-series models covering specific jurisdictions and the euro area within a closed economy, small open economy,...

The digitalisation workstream report analyses the degree of digital adoption across the euro area and EU countries and the implications of digitalisation for measurement, productivity, labour markets and inflation, as well as more recent developments during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic...

The existence of nominal rigidities and inflation differentials between countries offers two of the main rationales for an inflation buffer in a monetary union where monetary policy is oriented towards an area-wide inflation objective. Evidence accumulated since 2003 suggests that nominal...

This paper analyses the transmission of financial shocks to the macroeconomy. The role of macro-financial linkages is investigated from an empirical perspective for the euro area as a whole, for individual euro area member countries and for other EU and OECD countries. The following key economic...