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...

We examine the global dimension of inflation in 24 OECD countries between 1980 and 2007 in a traditional Phillips curve framework. We decompose output gaps and changes in unit labor costs into common (or global) and idiosyncratic components using a factor analysis and introduce these components...

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...

Over the past three decades, the US natural gas market has witnessed significant changes. Utilizing a standard Bayesian model comparison method, this paper formally determines four regimes existing in the market. It then employs a Markov switching vector autoregressive model to investigate the...

This paper revisits the well-known VAR evidence on the real effects of uncertainty shocks by Bloom (Econometrica 2009(3): 623-685. doi: 10.3982/ECTA6248). We replicate the results in a narrow sense using Eviews. In a wide sense, we extend his study by working with a smooth transition-VAR...

Adding multivariate stochastic volatility of a flexible form to large Vector Autoregressions (VARs) involving over a hundred variables has proved challenging due to computational considerations and over-parameterization concerns. The existing literature either works with homoskedastic models or...