This paper is a first attempt at evaluating the determinants of the total interest rate differentials on government bonds between high yielders, namely Spain, Italy, Sweden, and Germany. In particular, we address the question of the relative importance of local and global factors in the...

In this paper we assess the possibility of producing unbiased forecasts for fiscal variables in the euro area by comparing a set of procedures that rely on different information sets and econometric techniques. In particular, we consider ARMA models, VARs, small scale semi-structural models at...

Nowadays a considerable amount of information on the behavior of the economy is readily available, in the form of large datasets of macroeconomic variables. Central bankers can be expected to base their decisions on this very large information set, so that it can be difficult to track their...