This monthly monetary model for the euro area is gradually constructed from its two constituting components: a money demand and a loan demand model which both include the relation between the respective retail bank rates and the short-term market interest rate. Eventually, the encompassing...

Based on a literature review, this paper investigates the reasons why broad money demand has usually been found to be more stable in the euro area than in other large economies. The paper concludes that there are three main explanations for this fact. First, in some countries outside the euro...

This paper re-examines two data issues concerning euro area money demand: aggregation of national data and measurement of the own rate.The main purpose is to study if euro area money demand is subject to parameter non-constancies using formal tests rather than informal diagnostics. As a...

The present paper analyses currency in circulation in the euro area since the beginning of the 1980s. After a comprehensive literature review on this topic we present some stylised facts on currency holdings in the euro area countries as well as at an aggregate euro area level. The next chapter...

This paper analyses the information content of M1 for euro area real GDP since the beginning of the 1980s and reviews theoretical arguments on why real narrow money should help predict real GDP. We find that, unlike in the U.S., in the euro area, M1 has better and more robust forecasting...

We construct and estimate a joint model of macroeconomic and yield curve dynamics. A small-scale rational expectations model describes the macroeconomy. Bond yields are affine functions of the state variables of the macromodel, and are derived assuming absence of arbitrage opportunities and a...

The aim of this paper is to assess whether explicitly modeling structural change increases the accuracy of macroeconomic forecasts. We produce real time out-of-sample forecasts for inflation, the unemployment rate and the interest rate using a Time-Varying Coefficients VAR with Stochastic...

Policy counterfactuals based on estimated structural VARs routinely suggest that bringing Alan Greenspan back in the 1970s’ United States would not have prevented the Great Inflation. We show that a standard policy counterfactual suggests that the Bundesbank–which is near-universally...

We propose a new method for medium-term forecasting using exogenous information. We first show how a shifting-mean autoregressive model can be used to describe characteristic features in inflation series. This implies that we decompose the inflation process into a slowly moving nonstationary...

This paper reviews the key economic issues concerning the welfare costs of inflation and deflation, with a view to shedding light on the desirable properties of the inflation process. Our review of the evidence on the overall costs of inflation and deflation indicates that such costs could be...