GDP, the key statistics describing the state of the economy, is collected at low frequency, typically on a quarterly basis, and released with a substantial lag. The goal of this paper is to have the most timely and accurate idea about the current real economic activity, measured by the growth...

This paper analyses the determinants of sovereign spreads in the euro area from January 2002 to May 2012. The objective is to disentangle the role of country-specific fundamentals, driven by fiscal and macroeconomic factors, from what is referred to as contagion. Following the existing empirical...