Both global imbalances and financial market (de-)regulation feature prominently among the potential causes of the global financial crisis, but they have been largely discussed separately. In this paper, we take a different angle and investigate the relationship between financial market...

What drives volatility on financial markets? This paper takes a comprehensive look at the predictability of financial market volatility by macroeconomic and financial variables. We go beyond forecasting stock market volatility (by large the focus in previous studies) and additionally investigate...

Forecasting inflation is generally considered a challenging task as forecasters face fundamental uncertainty about the proper selection of variables driving inflation dynamics. In this paper, we investigate the forecasting performance of variables representing economic activity, monetary policy...

We compare direct forecasts of HICP and HICP excluding energy and food in the euro area and five member countries to aggregated forecasts of their main components from large Bayesian VARs with a shared set of predictors. We focus on conditional point and density forecasts, in line with...

We compare direct forecasts of HICP and HICP excluding energy and food in the euro area and five member countries to aggregated forecasts of their main components from large Bayesian VARs with a shared set of predictors. We focus on conditional point and density forecasts, in line with...

Bayesian model averaging is used for testing for multiple break points in uni- variate series using conjugate normal-gamma priors. This approach can test for the number of structural breaks and produce posterior probabilities for a break at each point in time. Results are averaged over...

This paper introduces a new model of trend (or underlying) inflation. In contrast to many earlier approaches, which allow for trend inflation to evolve according to a random walk, ours is a bounded model which ensures that trend inflation is constrained to lie in an interval. The bounds of this...

This paper contributes to the debate on the role of money in monetary policy by analyzing the information content of money in forecasting euro-area inflation. We compare the predictive performance within and among various classes of structural and empirical models in a consistent framework using...

In this paper we investigate the forecasting performance of the median Consumer Price Index (CPI) in a variety of Bayesian vector autoregressions (BVARs) that are often used for monetary policy. Until now, the use of trimmed-mean price statistics in forecasting inflation has often been relegated...