Optimal monetary policy studies typically rely on a single structural model and identification of model-specific rules that minimize the unconditional volatilities of inflation and real activity. In our proposed approach, we take a large set of structural models and look for the model-robust...

We investigate whether European banks adjust their loan prices and volumes of new lending in the months running up to major national elections. Using a unique dataset that draws on data covering some 250 banksin 19 Eurozone countries from 2010 to 2020 at monthly frequency, and that includes...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, economists have struggled to obtain reliable economic predictions, with standard models becoming outdated and their forecasting performance deteriorating rapidly. This paper presents two novelties that could be adopted by forecasting institutions in unconventional...

We find that deep contractions have highly persistent scarring effects, depressing the level of GDP at least a decade hence. Drawing on a panel of 24 advanced and emerging economies from 1970 to the present, we show that these effects are nonlinear and asymmetric: there is no such persistence...

We analyse the performance of financial market variables in nowcasting Finnish quarterly GDP growth. Especially, we assess if prediction accuracy is affected by the sampling frequency of the financial variables. Therefore, we apply MIDAS models that allow us to forecast quarterly GDP growth...

This paper presents the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) -based framework for analysing euro area inflation outlook. Our NKPC specification, that relies on market- and survey-based inflation expectations, explains well euro area inflation dynamics. Its forecasting performance is also...

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...

In this paper we analyze features of the recent business cycle with a New Keynesian small open economy DSGE model with labour market frictions and wage rigidity. The model complements the existing analytical tools of the Bank of Finland by enabling detailed analysis of labour markets in a DSGE...

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...

We propose a novel copula approach to producing density forecasts of economic aggregates combining models using disaggregate data. Our copula approach is more flexible compared to existing techniques, because it is applicable to any econometric model that produces density forecasts. We construct...