In Denmark official quarterly national accounts are only available for the period since 1977. The paper constructs a set of summary non-seasonally adjusted quarterly national accounts for Denmark for 1948-2010 in current and constant prices as well as a set of other key quarterly macroeconomic...

Official estimates of economic growth are regularly revised and therefore forecasts for GDP growth are done on the basis of ever-changing data. The economic literature has intensively studied the properties of those revisions and their implications for forecasting models. However, it is much...

In Denmark official quarterly national accounts are only available for the period since 1977. The paper constructs a set of summary non-seasonally adjusted quarterly national accounts for Denmark for 1948-2010 in current and constant prices as well as a set of other key quarterly macroeconomic...

Despite substantial differences in monetary policy and communication strategies, many central banks share the practice of purdah, a self-imposed guideline of abstaining from communication around policy meetings or other important events. This practice is remarkable, as it seems to contradict the...

This paper provides an empirical test of the scapegoat theory of exchange rates (Bacchetta and van Wincoop 2004, 2011), as an attempt to evaluate its potential for explaining the poor empirical performance of traditional exchange rate models. This theory suggests that market participants may at...

Economic policy makers, international organisations and private-sector forecasters commonly use short-term forecasts of real GDP growth based on monthly indicators, such as industrial production, retail sales and confidence surveys. An assessment of the reliability of such tools and of the...

The main focus of this paper is the relation between the cyclical components of total revenues and expenditures and the budget balance in France, Germany, Portugal, and Spain. We try to uncover past trends behind the development of public finances that contribute to explaining the current stance...

This paper uses a two-step approach to characterize the evolution of US macroeconomic and financial variables during episodes of very high uncertainty. First, we identify episodes of very high uncertainty using a regime-switching model. Second, we assess the behaviour of macroeconomic and...

The sovereign debt crisis in the euro area has increased the interest in early warning indicators, with the aim to indicate the build?up of fiscal stress early on and to facilitate crisis prevention by a timely counteraction of fiscal and macroeconomic policies. This paper presents possible...

This paper explores how changes in macroeconomic uncertainty have affected the decision to participate in the European Central Bank’s Survey of Professional Forecasters. Two different approaches are employed in order to address this question. First, a time-series analysis explores if changes...