The main conclusions drawn from the authors' analysis are as follows. There has been significant improvement in the physical adequacy of the housing stock over the past few decades, particularly for households in the lowest income quintile. As a result, today there is very little difference...

Since the late 1990s, the combination of relatively high services inflation and declining goods prices has produced a record-level gap in these inflation rates. Some commentators argue that if the gap between services and goods inflation continues to expand in this manner, the outcome will be...

We study regression models that involve data sampled at different frequencies. We derive the asymptotic properties of the NLS estimators of such regression models and compare them with the LS estimators of a traditional model that involves aggregating or equally weighting data to estimate a...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, economists have struggled to obtain reliable economic predictions, with standard models becoming outdated and their forecasting performance deteriorating rapidly. This paper presents two novelties that could be adopted by forecasting institutions in unconventional...

In response to the two waves of Covid-19 in 2020, the Italian government implemented a general lockdown in March, but geographically targeted policies during fall. We exploit this natural experiment to compare the effects of the two policies in a difference-in-differences design, leveraging a...

This paper estimates a time-varying AR-GARCH model of inflation producing measures of inflation uncertainty for the euro area, and investigates the linkages between them in a VAR framework, also allowing for the possible impact of the policy regime change associated with the start of EMU in...

This paper estimates a time-varying AR-GARCH model of inflation producing measures of inflation uncertainty for the euro area, and investigates the linkages between them in a VAR framework, also allowing for the possible impact of the policy regime change associated with the start of EMU in...

For years the economics profession has been puzzled by one of the most perplexing economic problems - the overall slowdown in the growth rate of labour productivity since 1973. Not only was the deceleration a worldwide trend, the growth of productivity also turned out to be markedly slower in...

Time-varying parameter (TVP) models have the potential to be over-parameterized, particularly when the number of variables in the model is large. Global-local priors are increasingly used to induce shrinkage in such models. But the estimates produced by these priors can still have appreciable...