Skeptic views on EMU are usually cast around three arguments. First, the EU does not satisfy 'Optimum Currency Area' (OCA) conditions. Second, heterogeneous economic and financial structures will produce differences in monetary transmission. Third, the shift from domestic to area-wide...

A structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) approach is used to identify the forces driving house prices fluctuations in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the UK over the period 1970-1998. Quarterly time series for real house prices, GDP, money, inflation and interest rates are...

Structural models are a powerful tool for business cycle and monetary policy analysis because they are invariant to either policy changes or external shocks. In this paper, we derive a Sidrauski-type model in which both the demand and supply side are structural in the sense that the behavioral...

This paper assesses the statistical reliability of different measures of the output gap for the Euro-11 area and the US using output, inflation and unemployment systems. In order to assess the reliability of an output gap estimate two criteria are adopted. Firstly, the estimate should have...

This paper addresses the issue of measuring the NAIRU for the euro area and assessing the robustness and precision of the obtained estimates. The empirical framework adopted is based on systems combining an Okun-type relationship between cyclical unemployment and the output gap with a Phillips...

Estimates of cyclically-adjusted budget balances, correcting actual government budget balances for business cycle fluctuations, are produced by many institutions, including the European Commission, the IMF and the OECD. This paper presents an alternative approach for the cyclical adjustment of...

The cost-of-financing channel version of the financial accelerator proposed by Bernanke & Gertler [1989] is prominent in the literature. Yet, this particular channel has not been validated by empirical work. This paper presents an alternative version of the accelerator. This new accelerator,...

The durable goods sector is much more interest sensitive than the non-durables sector, and these sectoral differences have important implications for monetary policy. In this paper, we perform VAR analysis of quarterly US data and find that a monetary policy innovation has a peak impact on...

We develop a general equilibrium model of a two-region currency union. There are two types of goods: non-traded goods, and traded goods for which markets are segmented. Monetary policy is set by a central monetary authority and is non-neutral due to nominal price rigidities. Fiscal policy is...

The paper investigates real-time output gap estimates for the euro artea obtained from various unobserved components (UOC) models. Based on a state space modelling framework, three criteria are used to evaluate real-time estimates, I.e. standard errors, unbiasedness and conditional inflation...