The paper presents an incomplete competition model (ICM), where inflation is determined jointly with unit labour cost growth. The ICM is estimated on data for the Euro area and evaluated against existing models, i.e. the implicit inflation equation of the Area Wide model (AWM) - cf. Fagan, Henry...

The first official data releases of quarterly real GDP for the euro area are published about eight weeks after the end of the reference quarters. Meanwhile, ongoing economic developments must be assessed from various, more readily available, monthly indicators. We examine in the context of...

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...

In the paper we propose a new methodological approach to core in- flation estimation, based on a frequency domain principal components estimator, suited to estimate systems of fractionally cointegrated processes. The proposed core inflation measure is the scaled common persistent factor in...

Equilibrium correction models of the price level are often used to model inflation. Such models assume that the long-run markup of prices over costs is fixed, but this may not be true for the Euro area economy, which has undergone major structural reforms over the last 25 years. We allow for...

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...

In this paper we investigate whether the forecast of the HICP components (indirect approach) improves upon the forecast of overall HICP (direct approach) and whether the aggregation of country forecasts improves upon the forecast of the euro-area as a whole, considering the four largest euro...

We develop a time-varying transition probabilities Markov Switching model in which inflation is characterised by two regimes (high and low inflation). Using Bayesian techniques, we apply the model to the euro area, Germany, the US, the UK and Canada for data from the 1960s up to the present. Our...

To forecast an aggregate, we propose adding disaggregate variables, instead of combining forecasts of those disaggregates or forecasting by a univariate aggregate model. New analytical results show the effects of changing coefficients, mis-specification, estimation uncertainty and...

This paper proposes a methodology to nowcast and forecast inflation using data with sampling frequency higher than monthly. The nowcasting literature has been focused on GDP, typically using monthly indicators in order to produce an accurate estimate for the current and next quarter. This paper...