Prediction markets are specific financial markets designed to produce forecasts of future events, such as political election outcomes or economic policy decisions. Empirical studies have exhibited over the years the significant accuracy of these anticipations, which tends to give credit to the...

We set out to decompose government investment, seeking especially to estimate how much governments in Europe invest in infrastructure in general and transport infrastructure in particular. It is concluded that infrastructure accounts for about one-third of overall government investment in the EU...

The main purpose of this paper is to preview the other contributions to this volume of the EIB Papers. In this context, it offers a few additional perspectives. One highlights why energy issues have re-emerged as a matter of policy interest. Another concerns the difference between the...

Recognising that environmental and technology externalities affect the development of renewable energy technologies, this paper illustrates how environmental policies induce technological change and how market failures that hinder technological progress weaken the impact of environmental...

See also comment 'Investment and growth in the time of climate change' Climate scientists mostly agree that, if current trends continue, global greenhouse-gas emissions are very likely to result in dangerous interference by mankind in the earthâ??s climate. Against this background, the world...

[eng] Modeling Equilibrium Exchange Rates and Estimating them for the Euro, Dollar and Yen by Laurent Maurin . This paper starts with a discussion of the problematic of equilibrium exchange rates and then presents NATREX. Based on this, we develop a model that studies both the foreign debt and...

This paper estimates euro area banks’ internal target capital ratios and investigates whether banks’ adjustment to the targets affects their credit supply and securities holdings during the financial crisis in 2005–2011. Based on data on listed banks and country-specific macro-variables, a...

Several factor-based models are estimated to investigate the role of country-specific trade and survey data in forecasting euro area manufacturing production. Following Boivin and Ng (2006), the emphasis is put on the role of dataset selection on the empirical performance of factor models....

The paper focuses on the estimation of the euro area output gap. We construct model-averaged measures of the output gap in order to cope with both model uncertainty and parameter instability that are inherent to trend-cycle decomposition models of GDP. We first estimate nine models of...

This paper explores the behavior of profits in the four largest euro area countries (Germany, France, Italy and Spain) and the euro area as a whole, while at the same time considering three main sectors (manufacturing, construction and services) in each economy over the period 1988–2010. The...