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...

Time-varying exchange rate pass-through effects to domestic prices under fixed euro exchange rate perspective represent one of the most challenging implications of the common currency. The problem is even more crucial when examining crisis related redistributive effects associated with relative...

We construct a Bayesian vector autoregressive model with three layers of information: the key drivers of inflation, cross-country dynamic interactions, and country-specific variables. The model provides good forecasting accuracy with respect to the popular benchmarks used in the literature. We...

The period of extraordinary volatility in euro area headline inflation starting in 2007 raised the question whether forecast combination methods can be used to hedge against bad forecast performance of single models during such periods and provide more robust forecasts. We investigate this issue...

Forecasting inflation is an important and challenging task. In this paper we assume that the core inflation components evolve as a multivariate local level process. This model, which is theoretically attractive for modelling inflation dynamics, has been used only to a limited extent to date...

For the last two years inflation has been systematically falling across countries in the European Union and lately it exhibits rising deflationary pressures. Recent studies suggest that apart from global determinants influencing broad inflation measures, e.g. plummeting commodity prices, core...

Using a small Bayesian dynamic factor model of the euro area we estimate the deviations of output from its trend that are consistent with the behavior of inflation. We label these deviations the output gap. In order to pin-down the features of the model, we evaluate the accuracy of real-time...

The global rise in food commodity prices is passing through strongly to the consumer prices that households pay for these products. Further, the current episode has seen a more widespread increase in food items than other historical periods of stress in these markets. The results of an...

In this paper we investigate whether the forecast of the HICP components (indirect approach) improves upon the forecast of overall HICP (direct approach) and whether the aggregation of country forecasts improves upon the forecast of the euro-area as a whole, considering the four largest euro...