The conflict between Russia and Ukraine that started in March 2014 led Western countries and Russia to impose economic sanctions on each other, including the euro zone members. The paper investigates the impact of the sanctions on the real side of the economies of Russia and the euro area. The...

Can fixed exchange rate regimes cause output divergence among member states? We show that such divergence is a long-run equilibrium characteristic of a two-region model with fixed exchange rates, heterogeneous labor markets, and endogenous growth. Under flexible exchange rates, monetary policy...

This paper analyses the endogeneity of euro area total factor productivity and its role in business cycle amplification by estimating a medium-scale DSGE model with endogenous productivity mechanism on euro area data. In this framework, total factor productivity evolves endogenously as a...

This paper proposes a new model-based method to obtain a coincident indicator for the business cycle. A dynamic factor model with trend components and a common cycle component is considered which can be estimated using standard maximum likelihood methods. The multivariate unobserved components...

This paper examines whether Euro Area countries would have faced a more favorable inflation output variability tradeoff without the Euro. We provide evidence that this claim is true for the periods of the Great Recession and the European Sovereign Debt Crisis. For the Euro Area as a whole, the...

Many empirical studies have shown that factor models produce relatively accurate forecasts compared to alternative short-term forecasting models. These empirical findings have been established for different macroeconomic data sets and different forecast horizons. However, various specifications...