The paper analyzes the forces driving inflation in the new EU10 member countries. A significant part of headline inflation in these countries is due to common factors, such as price level convergence and EU integration. However, idiosyncratic factors have also played a role in the inflation...

This paper contributes to the debate on the role of money in monetary policy by analyzing the information content of money in forecasting euro-area inflation. We compare the predictive performance within and among various classes of structural and empirical models in a consistent framework using...

We analyze the European Central Bank's (ECB's) response to the global financial crisis. Our results suggest that even during the crisis, the core part of ECB's monetary policy transmission-from policy rates to market rates-has continued to operate, but at a decreased efficiency. We also find...

Monetary aggregates continue to play an important role in the ECB's policy strategy. This paper revisits the case for money, surveying the ongoing theoretical and empirical debate. The key conclusion is that an exclusive focus on non-monetary factors alone may leave the ECB with an incomplete...

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,...

This paper's analysis of growth and inflation dispersions in the euro area reveals several findings. First, these dispersions have declined appreciably since EMU; remaining dispersions are small but persistent, relating mainly to country-specific shocks, not differences in the transmission of...

Driving forces of inflation in the eight new EU member states from Central and Eastern Europe are analyzed using the generalized dynamic-factor model (GDFM) developed by Forni et al. the impact of various macroeconomic variables on inflation is estimated by regressing the GDFM idiosyncratic...

This paper outlines a simple approach for incorporating extraneous predictions into structural models. The method allows the forecaster to combine predictions derived from any source in a way that is consistent with the underlying structure of the model. The method is flexible enough that...