The study looks at primary expenditure developments in the euro area, its three largest members and four “macro-imbalances” countries for the period 1999-2009. It compares actual expenditure trends with those that would have prevailed if countries had followed neutral policies based on...

A small labour market model for the six largest euro area countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium) is estimated in a state -space framework. The model entails, in the long run, four driving forces: a trend labour force component, a trend labour productivity component,...

Rational expectations has been the dominant way to model expectations, but the literature has quickly moved to a more realistic assumption of boundedly rational learning where agents are assumed to use only a limited set of information to form their expectations. A standard assumption is that...

The issue of forecast aggregation is to determine whether it is better to forecast a series directly or instead construct forecasts of its components and then sum these component forecasts. Notwithstanding some underlying theoretical results, it is generally accepted that forecast aggregation is...

This paper introduces the Bank of England's new forecasting platform and provides examples of how it can be applied to practical forecasting problems. The platform consists of four components: COMPASS, a structural central organising model; a suite of models, used to fill in the gaps in the...

Following the discontinuation of the official statistics on industrial new orders by Eurostat in mid-2012, this paper introduces the ECB indicator on euro area industrial new orders, which aims to fill the new statistical gaps for euro area total new orders as well as for various breakdowns....

We offer a novel methodology for assessing the quality of inflation reports. In contrast to the existing literature, which mostly evaluates the formal quality of these reports, we evaluate their economic content by comparing inflation factors reported by the central banks with ex-post...

Rational expectations has been the dominant way to model expectations, but the literature has quickly moved to a more realistic assumption of boundedly rational learning where agents are assumed to use only a limited set of information to form their expectations. A standard assumption is that...

Rational expectations has been the dominant way to model expectations, but the literature has quickly moved to a more realistic assumption of boundedly rational learning where agents are assumed to use only a limited set of information to form their expectations. A standard assumption is that...

This article examines the impact of news about the Bank of Japan monetary policy announcements regarding the Japanese yen, US dollar, and the Euro interest rates. Whether or not the announcements from the monetary authorities impact the domestic markets is related to the success of their...