The use of large datasets for macroeconomic forecasting has received a great deal of interest recently. Boosting is one possible method of using high-dimensional data for this purpose. It is a stage-wise additive modelling procedure, which, in a linear specification, becomes a variable selection...

This paper estimates ordered logit and probit regression models for bank ratings which also include a country index to capture country-specific variation. The empirical findings provide support to the hypothesis that the individual international bank ratings assigned by Fitch Ratings are...

We model EU countries' bank ratings using financial variables and allowing for intercept and slope heterogeneity. Our aim is to assess whether "old" and "new" EU countries are rated differently and to determine whether "new" ones are assigned lower ratings, ceteris paribus, than "old" ones. We...

Recent articles suggest that a Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) with shrinkage is a good forecast device even when the number of variables is large. In this paper we evaluate different variants of the BVAR with respect to their forecast accuracy for euro area real GDP growth and HICP...

We analyze the impact of Eurozone/Germany and U.S. macroeconomic news announcements and the communication of the monetary policy settings of the ECB and the Fed on the forex markets of new EU members. We employ an event study methodology to analyze intra-day data from 2011-2015. Our...

This paper studies the causes of price dispersion in the euro area emerging in response to a shock that hits all member countries symmetrically. We use a panel VAR model which is estimated over the period 1996 - 2007 to generate impulse responses of a range of price and wage variables to an oil...

This paper explores the importance of housing and mortgage market heterogeneity in 12 European countries for the transmission of monetary policy. We use a panel VAR model which is estimated over the period 19952006 to generate impulse responses of key macroeconomic variables to a monetary policy...

This paper examines the process of price discovery in the MTS system, which builds on the parallel quoting of euro-denominated government securities on a number of (relatively large) domestic markets and on a (relatively small) European marketplace (EuroMTS). Using twenty-seven months of daily...

In this paper we model the volatility of the spread between the overnight interest rate and the central bank policy rate (the policy spread) for the euro area and the UK during the two main phases of the financial crisis that began in late 2007. During the crisis, the policy spread exhibited...

Despite the fact that many aggregates are nonlinear functions and the aggregation weights of many macroeconomic aggregates are time-varying, much of the literature on forecasting aggregates considers the case of linear aggregates with fixed, time-invariant aggregation weights. In this study a...