In this paper we show that higher flexibility, measured by lower wage and price mark-ups leads to reduced inflationary pressures, increase in competitiveness, and higher output. A rational expectation and a learning version of the ECB's New Multi-Country Model are used to understand plausible...

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...

A balanced current account in the euro area has disguised sizeable net lending imbalances at the country level, exposing the common currency area to severe pressures during the financial crisis. The key contribution of this paper is to evaluate the adjustment process through the lenses of the...

We estimate and forecast growth in euro area monthly GDP and its components from a dynamic factor model due to Doz et al. (2005), which handles unbalanced data sets in an efficient way. We extend the model to integrate interpolation and forecasting together with cross-equation accounting...

This paper evaluates models that exploit timely monthly releases to compute early estimates of current quarter GDP (now-casting) in the euro area. We compare traditional methods used at institutions with a new method proposed by Giannone, Reichlin, and Small (2005). The method consists in...

In this paper we compare alternative approaches for the construction of time series of macroeconomic variables for Unified Germany prior to 1991, and then use them for the construction of corresponding time series for the euro area. The resulting series for Germany and the euro area are compared...

Diffusion indexes based on dynamic factors have recently been advocated by Stock and Watson (1998), and further used to perform forecasting tests by the same authors on US data. This technique is explored for the euro area using a multi-country data set and a broad array of variables, in order...

Global financial integration unlocks a huge potential for international risk sharing. We examine the degree to which international equity holdings act as a risk sharing device in industrial and emerging economies. We split equity returns into investment income (dividend distribution) and capital...