Collectively agreed reductions of working hours phased out in Europe in the 1990s. During the last two decades, working time became more flexible and heterogeneous. Working hours of full-time employees in the EU hardly changed. The strong increase in part-time work was the outstanding...

This paper assesses empirically the effects of oil price shocks on the real economic activity of the main industrialised countries. Multivariate VAR analysis is carried out using both linear and nonlinear models. The latter category includes three approaches employed in the literature, namely,...

Composition of the euro area workforce evolves over time and in response to changing labour market conditions. We construct an estimate of growth in euro area labour quality over the period 1983-2004 and show that labour quality has grown on average by 0.6% year-on-year over this time period....

Not so much and we should not, at least not yet.

We use Bayesian time-varying parameters VARs with stochastic volatility to investigate changes in the marginal predictive content of the yield spread for output growth in the United States and the United Kingdom, since the Gold Standard era, and in the Eurozone, Canada, and Australia over the...

Using data from the ECB's Survey of Professional Forecasters, we investigate the reporting practices of survey participants by comparing their point predictions and the mean/median/mode of their probability forecasts. We find that the individual point predictions, on average, tend to be biased...

In this paper we test whether a reallocation of government budget items can enhance long-term GDP growth in a set of European countries. We apply modern panel data techniques to the period 1970-2006, and we use three alternative dependent variables in a growth regression: economic growth, total...

This paper analyses the effects in terms of size and volatility of government revenue and spending on growth in OECD and EU countries. The results of the paper suggest that both variables are detrimental to growth. In particular, looking more closely at the effect of each component of government...

This paper evaluates how well sectoral stock prices forecast future economic activity compared to traditional predictors such as the term spread, dividend yield, exchange rates and money growth. The study is applied to euro area financial asset prices and real economic growth, covering the...

In this paper, we utilise the multi-country version of the NAWM to analyse the impact of globalisation on euro area macroeconomic aggregates. We provide alternative model-based definitions of globalisation associated with an increase in potential output in emerging Asia and its impact on total...