We study the effects that the Maastricht treaty, the creation of the ECB, and the Euro changeover had on the dynamics of European business cycles using a panel VAR and data from ten European countries - seven from the Euro area and three outside of it. There are slow changes in the features of...

This paper shows that inflation in industrialized countries is largely a global phenomenon. First, the inflation rates of 22 OECD countries have a common factor that alone accounts for nearly 70 percent of their variance. This large variance share that is associated with Global Inflation is not...

This article presents a method to estimate the coefficients, to test specification hypotheses, and to conduct policy exercises in multicountry Vector Autoregressive (VAR) models with cross-unit interdependencies, unit-specific dynamics, and time variations in the coefficients. The framework of...

Gibrat's law is a referent model of corporate growth dynamics. This paper employs Bayesian panel data methods to test for Gibrat's law and its implications. Using a Pharmaceutical Industry Database (1987-1998), we find evidence against Gibrat's law on average, within or across industries....

In this paper we investigate some properties of the patterns of firms’ growth. Several recent studies about this topic are based on some version of the so-called Gibrat’s Law, which assumes that firms’ growth is erratic. We aimed at testing Gibrat’s Law, as a first step towards a more...

This paper documents, for the first time in a systematic manner, the link between labor cost and price inflation in the euro area. Using country and sector quarterly data over the period 1985Q1-2018Q1 we find a strong link between labor cost and price inflation in the four major economies of the...

This paper presents the blueprint of a new ECB multi-country model. The version documented in the following pages is estimated on euro area data. As a prelude to the country models, this version is meant to enhance the understanding of the main model mechanisms, enlarge the suite of area wide...

This paper integrates panel VARs and the index models into a unique framework where cross unit interdependencies and time variations in the coefficients are allowed for. The setup used is Bayesian and MCMC methods are used to estimate the posterior distribution of the features of interest and to...

We aim at testing Gibrat's Law, a building block of the corporate growth dynamics. Using a Bayesian statistical framework that nests previous approaches, we provide evidence against Gibrat's law on average, within or across industries. Notwithstanding, data show only weak evidence of mean...

The problem of testing a set of restrictions R(q)=0 in a complex hierarchical model is considered. We propose a different approach from the standard PO ratio test, which can be viewed as the Bayesian analogous to the classical Wald type test. With respect to the PO ratio, it has the advantage of...