Surveying the forecasting practice of several central banks, we find that all these banks issue statements about risks to their macroeconomic forecasts. Often the balance of these risks is assessed as well. Upward [downward] risks to the forecast commonly imply that the outturn is expected to...

Macroeconomic risk assessments play an important role in the forecasts of many institutions. However, to the best of our knowledge their performance has not been investigated yet. In this work, we study the Bank of England?s risk forecasts for inflation. We find that these forecasts do not...

This study examines differences in the interest rate response to an ECB policy impulse in the euro area, the new EU-member states, and in the other non-eurozone EU countries in order to gauge the degree of interest rate alignment in Europe. To this end, PANIC, a Panel Analysis of...

The policy importance of non-core liabilities has risen to prominence in recent years with the studies of Shin and Shin (2010), Hahm, et al., (2010) and Hahm, et al., (2013) highlighting it as a useful indicator of financial procyclicality and vulnerability. In this paper, we look at non-core...

Many recent papers in macroeconomics have used large Vector Autoregressions (VARs) involving a hundred or more dependent variables. With so many parameters to estimate, Bayesian prior shrinkage is vital in achieving reasonable results. Computational concerns currently limit the range of priors...

This paper investigates how and to what extent nonlinearity, including the zero lower bound on the nominal interest rate, affects the estimates of the natural rate of interest in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with sticky prices and wages. We find that the estimated natural rate...

We highlight how detrending within Structural Vector Autoregressions (SVAR) is directly linked to the shock identification. Consequences of trend misspecification are investigated using a prototypical Real Business Cycle model as the Data Generating Process. Decomposing the different sources of...