This paper proposes a new method of forecasting euro area quarterly real GDP that uses area-wide indicators, which are derived by optimally pooling the information contained in national indicator series. Following the ideas of predictive modeling, we construct the area-wide indicators by...

This paper builds a model of investment and financing that incorporates heterogeneous firms into general equilibrium. In order to characterize the financial structure of an economy, the model connects the share of market finance in total external finance and the distribution of firm sizes into a...

We compare direct forecasts of HICP and HICP excluding energy and food in the euro area and five member countries to aggregated forecasts of their main components from large Bayesian VARs with a shared set of predictors. We focus on conditional point and density forecasts, in line with...

We quantify all statements by major European politicians reported by Reuters during the August 2011 to December 2011 period and show that political communication significantly affects European stock and bond markets as well as the EUR-USD exchange rate. Communication with respect to Italy...

We investigate the dynamics of stochastic convergence of the original Euro Area countries for inflation rates, nominal interest rates, and real interest rates. We test for convergence relative to Germany, taken as the benchmark for core EU standards, using monthly data over the period January...