We study a matched sample of individual stock market forecasts consisting of both qualitative and quantitative forecasts. This allows us to test for the quality of forecast quantification methods by comparing quantified qualitative forecasts with actual quantitative forecasts. Focusing mainly on...

A high degree of cyclical synchronization between central and east European countries (CEECs) and the euro area is generally seen as a prerequisite for successful EMU enlargement. This paper investigates comovements between CEECs and the euro area. We first establish stylized facts on economic...

This paper proposes a new framework for studying the effects of monetary policy on business investment. Important ambiguities with the modeling of investment dynamics and interactions between real and financial decisions suggest modeling investment spending as a VAR. Based on a panel of...

A distinguishing feature of the ECB's monetary policy setup is the preannouncement of a minimum bid rate in its weekly repo auctions. However, whenever interest rates are expected to decline, the minimum bid rate is viewed as too high and banks refrain from bidding, severely impeding the ECB's...

Factor models can cope with many variables without running into scarce degrees of freedom problems often faced in a regression-based analysis. In this article we review recent work on dynamic factor models that have become popular in macroeconomic policy analysis and forecasting. By means of an...

This paper provides a review of the literature on unit roots and cointegration in panels where the time dimension (T), and the cross section dimension (N) are relatively large. It distinguishes between the first generation tests developed on the assumption of the cross section independence, and...

This paper discusses a factor model for estimating monthly GDP using a large number of monthly and quarterly time series in real-time. To take into account the different periodicities of the data and missing observations at the end of the sample, the factors are estimated by applying an EM...

From time to time, economies undergo far-reaching structural changes. In this paper we investigate the consequences of structural breaks in the factor loadings for the specification and estimation of factor models based on principal components and suggest test procedures for structural breaks....

We extend the frequency-specific Granger-causality test of Breitung and Candelon (2006) to a more general null hypothesis that allows non-causality at unknown frequencies within an interval, instead of having to prespecify a single frequency. This setup corresponds better to most hypotheses that...