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....

This paper examines the relation between money and housing variables in the euro area and in the US. Our empirical model is based on a standard money demand relation which is augmented by housing market variables. In doing so, co-integrated money demand relationships can be established for both...

Although stable money demand functions are crucial for the monetary model of the exchange rate, empirical research on exchange rates and money demand is more or less disconnected. This paper tries to fill the gap for the Euro/Dollar exchange rate. We investigate whether monetary disequilibria...

In this study we construct a measure of macroeconomic uncertainty from several observable economic indicators for the euro area. Indicator variables are based on financial market data, such as medium-term returns, loss and volatility measures but also come from surveys that capture business and...

The first part of this paper outlines the concept of democratic accountability of central banks, and compares the legal accountability of the ECB with some other central banks (Bank of Canada, Bank of Japan, Bank of England and the Federal Reserve System). In the second part, we present a theory...

The canonical New Keynesian model specifies inflation as the present-value of future real marginal cost. This paper tests this New Keynesian Phillips Curve and exploits projections of future real marginal cost generated by VAR models to assess the model’s ability to match the behavior of...

This paper assesses the performance of monetary indicators in predicting euro area HICP inflation out-of-sample over the period since the start of EMU considering a wide range of forecasting models, including standard bivariate forecasting models, factor models, simple combination forecasts as...