In this paper we propose a simple model to forecast industrial production in Italy up to 6 months ahead. We show that the forecasts produced using the model outperform some popular forecasts as well as those stemming from an ARIMA model used as a benchmark and those from some single equation...

Recent literature for developed economies has shown that output gap estimates go through important revisions over time, impairing their reliability in real time. We organize a real-time data set for Brazil’s GDP and assess the revisions of the output gap estimated by four different methods....

The price puzzle, an increase in the price level associated with a contractionary monetary shock, is investigated in a rich, 12-variable SVAR in which various factors that have been mooted as solutions are considered jointly. SVARs for the pre-1980 and post-1990 periods are identified...

This paper analyses the effect of measurement error in the output gap on efficient monetary policy rules in a simple estimated model of the US economy. While it is a well-known result that such additive uncertainty does not affect the optimal feedback rule in a linear-quadratic framework, it is...

Several recent studies have used multivariate unobserved components models to identify the output gap and the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment. A key assumption of these models is that one common cycle component, such as the output gap, drives the cyclical fluctuations in all...