Inflation in the euro area has been falling since mid-2013, turned negative at the end of 2014 and remained below target thereafter. This paper employs a Bayesian VAR to quantify the contribution of a set of structural shocks, identified by means of sign restrictions, to inflation and economic...

The paper studies Non-Stationary Dynamic Factor Models such that: (1) the factors Ft are I(1) and singular, i.e. Ft has dimension r and is driven by a q-dimensional white noise, the common shocks, with q r, and (2) the idiosyncratic components are I(1). We show that Ft is driven by r-c...

By representing a system of budget shares as an approximate factor model we determine its rank, i.e. the number of common functional forms, or factors and we estimate a base of the factor space by means of approximate principal components. We assume that the extracted factors span the same space...