We show that the news is a rich source of data on distressed firm links that drive firm- level and aggregate risks. The news tends to report about links in which a less popular firm is distressed and may contaminate a more popular firm. This constitutes a contagion channel that yields...

The aim of this article is to identify diversity between the EU-15 and the New Members in their implementation of the Lisbon Strategy in the period 2000-2010. By analyzing a set of structural indicators, we aim to fill a gap in the literature: a lack of publications providing complex evaluation...

This paper investigates the role of fiscal policies over the aggregate EMU business cycle. Previous studies, based on the assumption of non-separability between public and private consumption, obtain a large public consumption multiplier, a small fraction of non-Ricardian households and,...

This paper investigates which shocks drive asynchrony of business cycles in the euro area. Thereby, it unites two strands of literature, those on common features and on structural VAR analysis. In particular, we show that the presence of a common cycle implies collinearity of structural impulse...

In this paper we estimate a Bayesian vector autoregressive model with factor stochastic volatility in the error term to assess the effects of an uncertainty shock in the Euro area. This allows us to treat macroeconomic uncertainty as a latent quantity during estimation. Only a limited number of...

We estimate the causal effects of macroprudential policies on the entire distribution of GDP growth for advanced European economies using a narrative-identification strategy in a quantile-regression framework. While macroprudential policy has near-zero effects on the centre of the GDP-growth...

The treatment of owner-occupied housing costs is a recurring problem in the construction of consumer price indices, and there are competing methodologies. In the most widely-used Irish index, the Payments Approach, which attaches a weight to a term involving historical house prices and an...

By European standards Ireland ranks high on many non-economic indicators of well-being. This paper explores how macroeconomic conditions have affected a range of these indicators. Time series data are used to explore the association between unemployment, inflation, and the level and growth rate...