The balance sheet adjustment in the household sector was a prominent feature of the Great Recession that is widely believed to have held back the cyclical recovery of the US economy. A key question for the US outlook is therefore whether household deleveraging has ended or whether further...

Global current account imbalances are generally seen as a threat to world growth. Given that they are projected to remain high, in an environment of prevailing downside risks, what could be done to reduce these imbalances? Using NiGEM, a large-scale multi-country model, we build up a global...

This work provides empirical evidence for a sizeable, statistically significant negative impact of the quality of fiscal institutions on public spending volatility for a panel of 25 EU countries over the 1980-2007 period. The dependent variable is the volatility of discretionary fiscal policy,...

This paper describes the main features of Global Value Chains (GVCs) in the euro area taken as a whole and compares with other large trade players like the US, China and Japan. In addition, the perspective of individual euro area countries is considered, with a focus on intra euro area linkages....

The paper investigates the link between domestic demand pressure and exports by considering an error correction dynamic panel model for eleven euro area countries over the last two decades. The results suggest that there is a statistically signi?cant substitution e¤ect between domestic and...

We explore a new approach for nowcasting the output gap based on singular spectrum analysis. Resorting to real-time vintages, a recursive exercise is conducted so to assess the real-time reliability of our approach for nowcasting the US output gap, in comparison with some well-known benchmark...

We study the macroeconomic effects of bank runs in a neoclassical growth model with a fully microfounded banking system. In every period, the banks provide insurance against idiosyncratic liquidity shocks, but the possibility of sunspot-driven bank runs distorts the equilibrium allocation. In...

We use Portuguese firm-level data to investigate whether changes in resource misallocation may have contributed to the poor economic performance of some southern and peripheral European countries leading up to the Eurozone crisis. We extend Hsieh and Klenow's (2009) methodology to include...

We assess the effects of a temporary fiscal devaluation enacted in Spain or Portugal on the trade balance by simulating EAGLE, a large-scale multi-country dynamic general equilibrium model of the euro area. Social contributions paid by firms are reduced by 1 percent of GDP for four years and are...

This paper quantifies the role of expectation-driven cycles for housing market fluctuations in the United States. We find that news shocks: (1) account for a sizable fraction of the variability in house prices and other macroeconomic variables over the business cycle and (2) significantly...