The 20th anniversary of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) offers an opportunity to look back on the ECB's record and learn lessons that can improve the conduct of policy in the future. This paper charts the way the ECB has defined, interpreted and applied its monetary policy framework - its...

The Eurosystem staff forecasts are conditional on the financial markets, the global economy and fiscal policy outlook, and include expert judgement. We develop a multi-country BVAR for the four largest countries of the euro area and we show that it provides accurate conditional forecasts of...

This paper presents the blueprint of a new ECB multi-country model. The version documented in the following pages is estimated on euro area data. As a prelude to the country models, this version is meant to enhance the understanding of the main model mechanisms, enlarge the suite of area wide...

We study the information flow from the ECB on policy dates since its inception, using tick data. We show that three factors capture about all of the variation in the yield curve but that these are different factors with different variance shares in the window that contains the policy decision...

This paper evaluates models that exploit timely monthly releases to compute early estimates of current quarter GDP (now-casting) in the euro area. We compare traditional methods used at institutions with a new method proposed by Giannone, Reichlin, and Small (2005). The method consists in...

We estimate and forecast growth in euro area monthly GDP and its components from a dynamic factor model due to Doz et al. (2005), which handles unbalanced data sets in an efficient way. We extend the model to integrate interpolation and forecasting together with cross-equation accounting...