The paper investigates the macroeconomic and financial effects of oil prices shocks in the euro area since its creation in 1999, with a special focus on the recent slump. The analysis is carried out episode by episode, within a time-varying parameter framework, consistent with the view that "not...

Structural VAR models are frequently identified using sign restrictions on impulse responses. Moving beyond the popular but restrictive Normal-inverse-Wishart-Uniform prior, we develop a methodology that can handle almost any prior distribution on contemporaneous responses. We then propose a new...

This paper studies the role of global and regional variations in economic activity and policy in developed world in driving portfolio capital flows (PCF) to emerging markets (EMs) in a Factor Augmented Vector Autoregressive (FAVAR) framework. Results suggest that PCFs to EMs depend mainly on...

Central banks have usually employed short-term rates as the main instrument of monetary policy. In the last decades, however, forward guidance has also become a central tool for monetary policy. In an innovative way this paper combines two sources of extraneous information - high frequency...

In recent years local projections have become a more and more popular methodology for the estimation of impulse responses. Besides being relatively easy to implement, the main strength of this approach relative to the traditional VAR one is that there is no need to impose any specific assumption...

In this paper, we analyse Okun's law - a relation between the change in the unemployment rate and GDP growth - using data from Australia, the euro area, the United Kingdom and the United States. More specifically, we assess the relevance of non-Gaussianity when modelling the relation. This is...

In this paper, we estimate trend inflation in Sweden using an unobserved components stochastic volatility model. Using data from 1995Q4 to 2021Q4 and Bayesian estimation methods, we find that trend inflation has been well-anchored during the period - although in general at a level below the...

This paper develops a two-block Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) to estimate the spillover of external shocks to the Maltese economy. The model focuses on five broad macroeconomic shocks hitting the euro area; an aggregate demand shock, two aggregate supply shocks which respectively proxy...

Over the recent years Malta has experienced a remarkable increase in its labour force due to a large influx of immigrants and an unprecedented increase in the domestic participation. Driven by the observation of such a phenomenon, this paper aims at assessing the impact of foreign and domestic...