Recent work in the macroeconometric literature considers the problem of summarising efficiently a large set of variables and using this summary for a variety of purposes including forecasting. This paper applies a new factor extraction method to the extraction of core inflation and forecasting...

While a number of central banks publish their own business conditions indicators that rely on non-random sampling, knowledge about their statistical accuracy has been limited. Recently, de Munnik, Dupuis, and Illing (2009) made some progress in this area for the Bank of Canada's Business Outlook...

We investigate the accuracy of ex ante assessments of vulnerability to income poverty using cross-sectional data and panel data. We use long-term panel data from Germany and apply different regression models, based on household covariates and previous-year equivalence income, to classify a...

Due to the recent financial crisis, the interest in econometric models that allow to incorporate binary variables (such as the occurrence of a crisis) experienced a huge surge. This paper evaluates the performance of the Qual VAR, i.e. a VAR model including a latent variable that governs the...

In this paper, the interaction between inflation and monetary policy rules is analysed within the framework of a dynamic general equilibrium model derived from optimising behaviour and rational expectations. Using model simulations, it is illustrated that the control of monetary policy over the...