This paper examines the capital flow experience of transition economies which are also prospective EU members with a view to shedding light on the likely problems they might encounter with exchange rate policy in the run up to euro area membership. We show that they have been experiencing fairly...

We provide a new way of deriving a number of dynamic unobserved factors from a set of variables. We show how standard principal components may be expressed in state space form and estimated using the Kalman filter. To illustrate our procedure we perform two exercises. First, we use it to...

This paper explores the relationship between financial conditions and real economic activity in the euro area as a whole and for Greece in particular. We use a financial conditions index (see Angelopoulou et al., 2014) which is constructed using a wide range of prices, quantities, spreads and...

We examine real uncertainty (measured by the variability of real growth) and whether it impacts on inflation. Additionally, we investigate whether nominal or real uncertainty impact on growth and, if so, in what direction. The resultsindicate that nominal uncertainty impacted negatively on...

This paper examines the relationship between inflation and inflation uncertainty for Greece between 1981 and 2008. Univariate GARCH models are used to generate alternative measures of inflation uncertainty using both seasonally-adjusted and unadjusted data. Granger causality tests are...

This paper estimates the magnitude of the Balassa-Samuelson effect for Greece. We calculate the effect directly, using sectoral national accounts data, which permits estimation of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in the tradeables and nontradeables sectors. Our results suggest that it is...