A small labour market model for the six largest euro area countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium) is estimated in a state -space framework. The model entails, in the long run, four driving forces: a trend labour force component, a trend labour productivity component,...

A small labour market model for the six largest euro area countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium) is estimated in a state-space framework. The model entails, in the long run, four driving forces: a trend labour force component, a trend labour productivity component, a...

The paper evaluates the 24-month ahead inflation forecasting performance of various indicators of underlying inflation and structural models. The inflation forecast errors resulting from model misspecification are larger than the errors resulting from forecasting of exogenous variables. Also,...

We implement a two-step approach to construct a financing conditions index (FCI) for the euro area and its four larger member states (Germany, France, Italy and Spain). The method, which follows Hatzius et al. (2010), is based on factor analysis and enables to summarise information on financing...

This paper analyzes the determinants of Spain's macroeconomic fluctuations since the inception of the euro in 1999, with a special attention to observed growth and inflation differentials with respect to the rest of the European Monetary Union (EMU). For that purpose we estimate the Banco de...

Rational expectations has been the dominant way to model expectations, but the literature has quickly moved to a more realistic assumption of boundedly rational learning where agents are assumed to use only a limited set of information to form their expectations. A standard assumption is that...

Rational expectations has been the dominant way to model expectations, but the literature has quickly moved to a more realistic assumption of boundedly rational learning where agents are assumed to use only a limited set of information to form their expectations. A standard assumption is that...

This Working Paper presents a medium-term macroeconomic outlook for the major economic areas of the world. The outlook was prepared using nime, the Belgian Federal Planning Bureau's (fpb) macroeconometric world model. The Working Paper also features an assessment of the euro area's progress...

This paper investigates the factors behind the recent growth slowdown (so-called Secular Stagnation) in the US, the euro area and Japan using the metrics of potential output growth. Specifically, our results offer limited support for an impaired credit transmission channel hypothesis (Reinhart...

This paper investigates the factors behind the recent growth slowdown (so-called Secular Stagnation) in the US, the euro area and Japan using the metrics of potential output growth. Specifically, our results offer limited support for an impaired credit transmission channel hypothesis (Reinhart...