Stylized facts suggest that output volatility in OECD countries has declined in recent years. However, the causes and the nature of this decline have so far been analyzed mainly for the United States. In this paper, we analyze whether structural breaks in the dynamics and the volatility of the...

The labour productivity impact of innovation is investigated in this paper combining neo-Schumpeterian insights on the variety of innovation, with the importance of industrial structures and firm size; two models are proposed for explaining productivity and export success in European...

The paper investigates the differences between small, medium-sized and large firms regarding their performance in the introduction of new products and processes. After a review of the relevant literature, two models are proposed and tested in search for different business strategies and...

We use the Factor-Augmented Vector Autoregression (FAVAR) approach of Bernanke, Boivin and Eliasz (2005) to estimate the effects of monetary policy shocks on wages and employment in the euro area. The use of a large data set comprising country, sectoral and euro area-wide data allows us to...

In this paper, it is analyzed whether core money growth helps to predict future inflation in a useful and reliable way. Using an out-of-sample forecasting exercise and a stability analysis, it is shown that core money growth carries important information not contained in the inflation history,...

In 2005, the European Emission Trading Scheme (EU-ETS) established a new commodity: the right to emit a ton of CO2 (EUA). Since its launch, the corresponding price has shown rather turbulent dynamics, including nervous reactions to policy announcements and a price collapse after a visible...

Chartist and fundamentalist models have proven to be capable of replicating stylized facts on speculative markets. In general, this is achieved by specifying nonlinear interactions of otherwise linear asset price expectations of the respective trader groups. This paper investigates whether or...

We project the path of the public debt and primary surpluses for a number of countries in the euro area under a fiscal rule based on a set of estimated fiscal policy reaction functions. Our fiscal rule represents a fiscal analogue to a well-known monetary policy rule, and it is calibrated using...

We formulate and estimate a simple fiscal policy reaction function for the euro area and individual euro area countries. Our reaction function allows for primary surpluses to feature three components: an anti-cyclical response of primary surpluses to the output gap, a response to the debt-GDP...

This paper studies the effects of ECB communications about unconventional monetary policy operations on the perceived sovereign risk of Italy over the last five years. More than fifty events concerning non-standard operations are identified and classified with respect to the specific ECB...