This paper analyses the impact of changes in environmental regulations on productivity growth at country- and firm-level. We exploit several data sources and the environmen-tal policy stringency index, to evaluate the Porter hypothesis, according to which firms’ productivity can benefit from...

In this paper we provide a positive exercise on past business-cycle correlations and risk sharing in the European Union, and on the ability of insurance mechanisms and fiscal policies to smooth income fluctuations. The results suggest in particular that while some of the new Member States have...

We quantitatively assess the macroeconomic effects of country-specific supply-side reforms in the euro area by simulating EAGLE, a multi-country dynamic general equilibrium model. We consider reforms in the labor and services markets of Germany (or, alternatively, Portugal) and the rest of the...

Rational expectations has been the dominant way to model expectations, but the literature has quickly moved to a more realistic assumption of boundedly rational learning where agents are assumed to use only a limited set of information to form their expectations. A standard assumption is that...

The model presented here is a New estimated medium-scale Multi-Country Model (NMCM) which covers the five largest euro area countries and is used for forecasting and scenarios analysis at the European Central Bank. The model has a tight theoretical structure which allows for non-unitary...

This paper provides evidence on whether the creation of the euro has changed the way global turbulences affect euro area and other economies. Specifically, it considers the impact of global shocks on the competitiveness of individual euro area countries and assesses whether their responses to...

This paper aims at providing a detailed analysis of the leading indicator properties of corporate bond spreads for real economic activity in the euro area. In- and out-of-sample predictive content of corporate bond spreads are examined along three dimensions: the bonds' quality, their term to...

A small labour market model for the six largest euro area countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium) is estimated in a state-space framework. The model entails, in the long run, four driving forces: a trend labour force component, a trend labour productivity component, a...

This paper develops a small-scale DSGE model which embeds a demographic structure within a monetary policy framework. We extend the tractable, though non-monetary overlapping-generations model of Gertler (1999) and present a small synthesis model which combines the set-up of Gertler with a...