This paper investigates the relationship between the Great Moderation and two measures of inflation performance: trend inflation and inflation volatility. Using annual data from 1970 to 2011 for a large panel of 180 developed and developing economies, the results show that, as expected, both...

The European Central Bank (ECB) has adopted a mixture of conventional and unconventional tools in order to achieve its mandate of price stability in the current low-inflation, low-interest-rate scenario. This paper contributes to the existing literature by providing a taxonomy of the ECB’s...

This paper studies the interaction between fiscal policy and bondholders against the backdrop of high sovereign debt levels. For our analysis, we investigate the case of Italy, a country that has dealt with high public debt levels for a long time, using a Bayesian structural VAR model. We extend...

This paper identifies five factors that can capture 95% of the variance across 39 US dollar exchange rates based on the principal component method. A time-varying parameter factor-augmented vector autoregressive (TVP-FAVAR) model is used to analyze the determinants of movements in these exchange...

This paper presents evidence on the persistence of inflation in the United States over the period 1947- 2010. Of particular interest is whether the persistence of inflation has changed over that time period. We use a reduced form approach to measuring inflation persistence, modeling inflation as...

In this paper we investigate whether the forecast of the HICP components (indirect approach) improves upon the forecast of overall HICP (direct approach) and whether the aggregation of country forecasts improves upon the forecast of the euro-area as a whole, considering the four largest euro...

We develop a time-varying transition probabilities Markov Switching model in which inflation is characterised by two regimes (high and low inflation). Using Bayesian techniques, we apply the model to the euro area, Germany, the US, the UK and Canada for data from the 1960s up to the present. Our...

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 investigates the existence of spillovers from stock prices onto consumption and the interest rate for South Africa using a time-varying vector autoregressive (TVP-VAR) model with stochastic volatility. In this regard, we estimate a three-variable TVP-VAR model comprising of real...

This paper investigates the existence of spillovers from the housing sector onto consumption and the interest rate for South Africa using a time-varying vector autoregressive (TVP-VAR) model with stochastic volatility. In this regard, we estimate a three-variable TVP-VAR model comprising of real...