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...

From time to time, economies undergo far-reaching structural changes. In this paper we investigate the consequences of structural breaks in the factor loadings for the specification and estimation of factor models based on principal components and suggest test procedures for structural breaks....

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...

This paper investigates the transmission of monetary policy in the euro area based on the factor augmented vector autoregressive approach of Bernanke, Boivin and Eliasz (2005) as well as on a standard VAR model. We focus on the reaction of monetary aggregates to a one-off monetary policy shock....

This paper re-investigates the implications of monetary policy rules on changes in exchange rate, in a risk-adjusted, uncovered interest parity model with unrestricted parameters, emphasizing the importance of modeling market expectations of monetary policy. I use consensus forecasts as a proxy...