Several authors have shown that there exists a significant relationship between the term structure of interest rates and future changes in the rate of inflation. More recently, this relationship has been strengthened through the introduction of nonlinearities and regime shifts. This paper...

We suggest the use of an Internet job-search indicator (the Google Index, GI) as the best leading indicator to predict the US unemployment rate. We perform a deep out-of-sample forecasting comparison analyzing many models that adopt both our preferred leading indicator (GI), the more standard...

When it comes to assess the sustainability of fiscal policy and public debt in Andean countries, two idiosyncratic facts of fiscal revenues have to be considered. First, fiscal revenues coming from natural resources represent up to 44% of total fiscal revenues, producing a strong correlation...

This paper studies the influence of external financial factors on economic activity in emerging economies (EMEs) motivated by a considerable increase in foreign financing by the corporate sector in EMEs since the early 2000s, mainly in the form of bond issuance. A quarterly external financial...

The headline consumer price index (CPI) is often considered too noisy, narrowly defined, and/or slowly available for policymaking. On the other hand, traditional core inflation measures may reduce volatility but do not address other issues and may even exclude important information. This paper...

This paper describes a dynamic factor model for the Maltese economy. The model mainly serves as a tool to timely provide the Central Bank of Malta with nowcasts as well as short-term forecasts of the growth rate of the real gross domestic product, which in turn are used as an input in the...

The funds allocated by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) aim to trigger a multiplier effect on GDP as they are designed to help the recovery after the Covid-19 pandemic. The GDP increase is in turn expected to drive energy consumption up which will increase CO2 emissions, given...

In order to enhance fiscal sustainability and regain “investment grade” credit rating, in 2011 Colombia implemented a fiscal rule (FR) on the Central Government's structural balance. Investment grade was rapidly attained, and FR targets were complied with, until 2019. Using the Synthetic...

Bank stability is an important aspect of financial stability, especially in bank-centric systems such as those in Southeast Europe. The financial crisis has shown that there is a particular need to monitor credit and other similar risks. Hence, it is important to analyse risks affecting the...

We demonstrate that short-run real exchange effective rate changes are dominated by nominal effective exchange rate changes, while inflation rates are sticky and contribute little to short-run real exchange rate changes. These observations allow a rather accurate real-time approximation of the...