This paper provides evidence on the reliability of euro area real-time output gap estimates. A genuine real-time data set for the euro area is used, including vintages of several sets of euro area output gap estimates available from 1999 to 2006. It turns out that real-time estimates of the...

The paper deals with the estimation of monthly indicators of economic activity for the Euro area and its largest member countries that possess the following attributes: relevance, representativeness and timeliness. Relevance is obtained by referring our monthly indicators to gross domestic...

We use a novel disaggregate sectoral euro area data set with a regional breakdown to investigate price changes and suggest a new method to extract factors from over-lapping data blocks. This allows us to separately estimate aggregate, sectoral, country-specific and regional components of price...