The paper provides a systematic empirical analysis of the role of the housing market in the macroeconomy in the US and in the euro area. First, it establishes some stylised facts concerning key variables in the housing market, such as the real house price, residential investment and mortgage...

We investigate the public-private wage differentials in ten euro area countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain). To account for differences in employment characteristics between the two sectors, we focus on micro data taken from EU-SILC....

The analysis of the macroeconomic impact of fiscal policies in the euro area has been traditionally limited by the absence of quarterly fiscal data. To overcome this problem, we provide two new databases in this paper. Firstly, we construct a quarterly database of euro area fiscal variables for...

We analyse the impact of fiscal policy shocks in the euro area as a whole, using a newly available quarterly dataset of fiscal variables for the period 1981-2007. To allow for comparability with previous results on euro area countries and the US, we use a standard structural VAR framework, and...

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the functional form of the euro area Phillips curve over the past three decades. In particular, compared to previous literature we analyse the stability of the relationship in detail, especially as regards the possibility of a time-varying mean of...

This paper is concerned with the estimation of euro area potential output growth and its decomposition according to the sources of growth. The growth accounting exercise is based on a multivariate structural time series model which combines the decomposition of total output according to the...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the macroeconomic impact of the expanded asset purchase programme (APP) announced by the European Central Bank (ECB) in January 2015. The shock associated to the APP is identified with a combination of sign, timing and magnitude restrictions in the...

This paper provides evidence on the reliability of euro area real-time output gap estimates. A genuine real-time data set for the euro area is used, including vintages of several sets of euro area output gap estimates available from 1999 to 2006. It turns out that real-time estimates of the...

Short-term fiscal indicators based on public accounts data are often used by European policy makers. They represent one of the main sources of publicly available intra-annual fiscal information. Nevertheless, these indicators have received limited attention from the academic literature analysing...

This study examines the business cycle behaviour of public consumption and its main components; the public wage bill (including compensation per employee and public employment) and intermediate consumption in the euro area aggregate, euro area countries and a group of selected non-euro area OECD...