This paper examines which measures of financial conditions are informative about the tail risks to output growth in the euro area. The Composite Indicator of Systemic Stress (CISS) is more informative than indicators focusing on narrower segments of financial markets or their simple aggregation...

In this paper, the authors develop a new tool to improve the short-term forecasting of real GDP growth in the euro area and Japan. This new tool, which uses unrestricted mixed-data sampling (U-MIDAS) regressions, allows an evaluation of the usefulness of a wide range of indicators in predicting...

Theoretical models of growth reveal that either exogenous or endogenous, technology is the main driving force behind the long-run economic growth. Furthermore, in the endogenous growth framework, diffusion of technology is the basic mechanism of per capita income convergence among countries....