Monitoring and forecasting price developments in the euro area is essential in the light of the second pillar of the ECBu0092s monetary policy strategy. This study analyses whether the forecasting accuracy of forecasting aggregate euro area inflation can be improved by aggregating forecasts of...

This paper examines the degree of price rigidity in Belgian consumer prices, using a large database. As to the observed degree of rigidity, the results reveal a substantial amount of heterogeneity, not only across but also within product categories. While prices turn out to be perfectly flexible...

The imbalances in bargaining power between the contracting parties in the food supply chain have drawn much attention, also from policy makers. The European Commission is committed to facilitate the restructuring of the sector by encouraging the creation of voluntary agricultural producer...

This case study will focus on the comparison between the development of structure and strategy in the Spanish fruit and vegetable producing areas of Almería and Valencia. These two regions are assumed to have gone through different developments in term of the structure and strategy that fruit...

This paper investigates the in inflationary effects of fscal policy in an optimizing general equilibrium monetary model with capital accumulation, exible prices and wealth effects. The model is calibrated to Euro Area quarterly data. Simulation results show that government defcits, high debt...

This paper investigates the performance of optimised interest rate rules when there is uncertainty about a key determinant of the monetary transmission mechanism, namely the degree of persistence characterising the inflation process. The paper focuses on the euro area and utilises two variants of...

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...

This paper summarises the results of a quantitative study of the possible impact of downward nominal wage rigidity on the determination of inflation and output in the euro area and the existence of a non-vertical long-run Phillips curve. The study was undertaken in the context of the review of...

The presence of a lower bound of zero on nominal interest rates has important implications for the conduct of optimal monetary policy. Standard rational expectations models can have alternative steady states as well as non-unique laws of motion, i.e. there can be possible sunspot equilibria....