This report presents the methodology for the construction of the Financial Stress Index (FSI) and the Economic Sensitivity Index (ESI) and investigates the economic situation in twelve Central and East European Countries (CEECs) between 2001 and 2012. The objective of this paper is to capture...

This paper discusses the forecasting performance of alternative factor models based on a large panel of quarterly time series for the german economy. One model extracts factors by static principals components analysis, the other is based on dynamic principal components obtained using frequency...

Spanish Abstract: Mediante un modelo BVAR y empleando los datos del Indicador Mensual de Actividad Económica (IMAE), se estima el efecto de distintos choques monetarios y del sector externo sobre el crecimiento cíclico del departamento del Valle del Cauca, y se compara con el efecto que tienen...

We introduce the concept of 'news entropy' to characterise the relationship between news coverage and the economy. Intuitively, news entropy decreases as the news focus on a smaller set of pressing topics. We observe that news entropy exhibits clear negative spikes close to important economic,...

This paper demonstrates how the real-time forecasting accuracy of different Brent oil price forecast models changes over time. We find considerable instability in the performance of all models evaluated and argue that relying on average forecasting statistics might hide important information on...

This paper presents forecasts for the Financial Stress Index (FSI) and the Economic Sensitivity Index (ESI) for the period 2014-2015 for six countries in the region, namely the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. It is a continuation of the endeavor to construct...

A mismatch between the time scale of a structural VAR (SVAR) model and that of the time series data used for its estimation can have serious consequences for identification, estimation and interpretation of the impulse response functions. However, the use of mixed frequency data, combined with a...

In this paper we show analytically, with simulation experiments and with actual data that a mismatch between the time scale of a DSGE model and that of the time series data used for its estimation generally creates identification problems, introduces estimation bias and distorts the results of...

From 2014 until present, housing prices in Germany have been rising faster than consumer prices in all quarters except one, raising concerns about an excessive over-heating of the housing market. To assess the vulnerability of the German housing market to a future realignment of prices or even a...

We introduce a Divisia monetary aggregate for the euro area that accounts for the heterogeneity across member countries both, in terms of interest rates and the decomposition of monetary assets. In most of the euro area countries, the difference between the growth rates of the country-specific...