This paper explores the feasibility of calculating absolute poverty lines on the basis of minimum food expenditures in developed countries. It makes three important contributions. First, it demonstrates that standard statistical methods used in the developing world deliver either inadequate...

Financial shocks generate a protracted and quantitatively important effect on real economic activity and financial markets only if the shocks are both negative and large. Otherwise, their role is quite modest. Financial shocks have become more important for economic fluctuations after the 2000...

Despite its stability over time, as for any statistical relationship, Okun's law is subject to deviations that can be large at times. In this paper, we provide a mapping between residuals in Okun's regressions and structural shocks identified using a SVAR model by inspecting how unemployment...

In a context where European stock prices have been trending upwards, one of the main concerns is that stocks perceived as more sustainable from an environmental, social and governance (ESG) perspective could be particularly exposed to exuberance. To shed some light on the magnitude of the...

We assess the macroeconomic impact of pandemic-related monetary policy measures of the ECB. Conditioning on counterfactual interest rate paths that would have materialised in the absence of the policies, the macroeconomic effects are measured using structural vector autoregressions. In the...

We propose a new Bayesian VAR model for forecasting household loan stocks in Finland. The model is designed to work as a satellite model of a larger DSGE model for the Finnish economy, the Aino 2.0 model. The forecasts produced with the BVAR model can be conditioned on projections of several...

We propose a multicountry quantile factor augmeneted vector autoregression (QFAVAR) to model heterogeneities both across countries and across characteristics of the distributions of macroeconomic time series. The presence of quantile factors allows for summarizing these two heterogeneities in a...

Financial shocks represent a major driver of fluctuations in tail risk, defined as the 5th percentile of the forecast distributions of output and inflation. Since the variance and the asymmetry of the forecast distributions are largely driven by the left tail, financial shocks turn out to play a...