This paper presents evidence for structural differences in economic growth dynamics between the current EU and the central- and eastern European accession countries. Two important results emerge from the analysis. First, accession countries have posted higher average growth and wider output...

The news about the economy contained in a central bank announcement can affect public expectations. This paper shows, using both event studies and vector autoregressions, that such central bank information effects are an important channel of the transatlantic spillover of monetary policy. They...

We build a stylised 12-country model of the euro area and use it to analyse why differences in national inflation and growth rates arise within the European monetary union. We find that inflation persistence is a key potential explanatory factor. Other more frequently mentioned reasons, like...

To analyze the international transmission of business cycle fluctuations, we propose a new multilevel dynamic factor model with a block structure that (i) does not restrict the factors to being orthogonal and (ii) mixes data sampled at quarterly and monthly frequencies. By means of Monte Carlo...

The fiscal consolidation measures adopted in many euro area countries over 2010-13 reduced excessive domestic fiscal imbalances, but came at the cost of short-term output losses. This simultaneous tightening of fiscal policy raised concerns that such output losses might be exacerbated by...

The paper presents a model-based assessment of fiscal multipliers operating in the euro area during the period 2011-2014. The assessment is conditional on two distinct reactions of the sovereign risk premium (either responding endogenously to fiscal shocks or being an exogenous process) and two...

We introduce a structural quantile vector autoregressive (VAR) model. Unlike standard VAR which models only the average interaction of the endogenous variables, quantile VAR models their interaction at any quantile. We show how to estimate and forecast multivariate quantiles within a recursive...

Central bank announcements simultaneously convey information about monetary policy and the central bank's assessment of the economic outlook. This paper disentangles these two components and studies their effect on the economy using a structural vector autoregression. It relies on the...

We propose a new and time-varying optimum currency area (OCA) index for the euro area in assessing the evolution of the OCA properties of the monetary union from an international business cycle perspective. It is derived from the relative importance of symmetric vs. asymmetric shocks that result...

A two-country sticky-price model is used to analyse the interactions between fiscal and monetary policy. The role of an u0091activistu0092 fiscal policy as a stabilisation tool is considered and a measure of the welfare gains from international fiscal policy cooperation is derived. It is found...