This paper shows that the EMU has not affected historical characteristics of member countries’ business cycles and their cross-correlations. Member countries which had similar levels of GDP per-capita in the seventies have also experienced similar business cycles since then and no significant...

As the global banking crisis intensified in the fall of 2008, governments announced comprehensive rescue packages for financial institutions. In this paper, we put the joint response of euro area bank and sovereign CDS premia under the microscope. We find that the bank rescue packages led to a...

We propose a shadow-rate term structure model for the euro area yield curve from 1999 to mid-2015, when bond yields had turned negative at various maturities. Yields in the model are constrained by a lower bound, but - as a special feature of our specification - the bound is allowed to change...

Using a small Bayesian dynamic factor model of the euro area we estimate the deviations of output from its trend that are consistent with the behavior of inflation. We label these deviations the output gap. In order to pin-down the features of the model, we evaluate the accuracy of real-time...

This paper provides new empirical evidence that bears on the efficacy of unconventional monetary policies when the main policy rate is negative. When a negative interest rate policy (NIRP) is deployed in concert with rate forward guidance (FG) and quantitative easing (QE), the identification of...

As the global banking crisis intensified in the fall of 2008, governments announced comprehensive rescue packages for financial institutions. In this paper, we put the joint response of euro area bank and sovereign CDS premia under the microscope. We find that the bank rescue packages led to a...

We analyse the impact on the euro area economy of the ECB's non-standard monetary policy measures by studying the effect of the expansion of intermediation of interbank transactions across the central bank balance sheet. We exploit data drawn from the aggregated Monetary and Financial...

This paper describes an algorithm to compute the distribution of conditional forecasts, i.e. projections of a set of variables of interest on future paths of some other variables, in dynamic systems. The algorithm is based on Kalman filtering methods and is computationally viable for large...

The Eurosystem staff forecasts are conditional on the financial markets, the global economy and fiscal policy outlook, and include expert judgement. We develop a multi-country BVAR for the four largest countries of the euro area and we show that it provides accurate conditional forecasts of...

This paper studies the relationship between the business cycle and financial intermediation in the euro area. We establish stylized facts and study their stability during the global financial crisis and the European sovereign debt crisis. Long-term interest rates have been exceptionally high and...