Short-term fiscal indicators based on public accounts data are often used by European policy makers. They represent one of the main sources of publicly available intra-annual fiscal information. Nevertheless, these indicators have received limited attention from the academic literature analysing...

To the best of our knowledge, our paper is the first systematic study of the predictive power of monetary aggregates for future inflation for the cross section of New EU Member States. This paper provides stylized facts on monetary versus non-monetary (economic and fiscal) determinants of...

We test the performance of a host of real and financial variables as early warning indicators for costly aggregate asset price boom/bust cycles, using data for 18 OECD countries between 1970 and 2007. A signalling approach is used to predict asset price booms that have relatively serious real...

Although many papers have already proposed empirical models of currency crises, the timing of such crises has received relatively little attention so far. Most papers use indeed a static specification and impose the same lag structure across all explanatory variables. This, by construction,...

In recent years, government revenues in many EU countries experienced significant and erratic changes, which, a priori, could not be fully explained by macroeconomic developments or by discretionary fiscal policy measures. We investigate this issue by estimating "unexplained" changes in tax and...

Using OECD composite leading indicators (CLI), we assess empirically whether the ability of the country-specific CLIs to predict economic activity has diminished in recent years, e.g. due to rapid advances in globalisation. Overall, we find evidence that the CLI encompasses useful information...

Beyer, Doornik and Hendry (2000, 2001) show analytically that three out of four aggregation methods yield problematic results when exchange rate shifts induce relative-price changes between individual countries and found the least problematic method to be the variable weight method of growth...

This paper aims at providing a detailed analysis of the leading indicator properties of corporate bond spreads for real economic activity in the euro area. In- and out-of-sample predictive content of corporate bond spreads are examined along three dimensions: the bonds’ quality , their term to...

From a conceptual point of view there is little consensus of what should be the ideal indicatorʺ of international cost and price competitiveness as each of the standard measures typically employed has its own merits and drawbacks. This calls for addressing the question from an empirical angle,...

There is a need to find better models and indicators for large disruptive events, not least in order to be more prepared and mitigate their effects. In this paper we take a step in this direction and discuss the performance of a financial stress indicator with a specific focus on the euro area....