This article takes advantage of access to confidential matched bank-firm data relative to the Belgian economy to investigate how employment decisions of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have been affected by credit constraints in the wake of the Great Recession. Variability in banks'...

We explore the dynamic effects of news about a future technology improvement which turns out ex post to be overoptimistic. We find that it is difficult to generate a boom-bust cycle (a period in which stock prices, consumption, investment and employment all rise and then crash) in response to...

This paper explores the role that the imperfect knowledge of the structure of the economy plays in the uncertainty surrounding the effects of rule-based monetary policy on unemployment dynamics in the euro area and the US. We employ a Bayesian model averaging procedure on a wide range of models...

We examine the performance and robustness properties of monetary policy rules in an estimated macroeconomic model in which the economy undergoes structural change and where private agents and the central bank possess imperfect knowledge about the true structure of the economy. Policymakers...

This paper describes how we constructed a real-time database for the euro area covering more than 200 series regularly published in the European Central Bank Monthly Bulletin, as made available ahead of publication to the Governing Council members before their first meeting of the month. We...

We analyze persistence in patterns of bilateral financial investment using data on US investors' holdings of foreign bonds. We document a 'history effect' in which the pattern of holdings seven decades ago continues to influence holdings today. 10 to 15% of the cross-country variation in US...

We estimate the degree of 'stickiness' in aggregate consumption growth (sometimes interpreted as reflecting consumption habits) for thirteen advanced economies. We find that, after controlling for measurement error, consumption growth has a high degree of autocorrelation, with a stickiness...