Capacity Utilisation (CU) measures play an important role in practical economic analysis. Variation in the extent to which existing capacity is being utilised provides an indication of how the supply side of a particular industry, sector or economy is evolving relative to its demand side. Such...

In this paper we review the well-known problem of how to measure price developments when the quality of the underlying goods and services is changing over time. The importance of appropriate methods to take account of quality change is highlighted from the perspective of monetary policy. In...

As a further contribution to the growing international literature on exchange rate pass-through (PT), this study assesses the extent of PT for Irish import prices over the period 1963 to 1995. It fills two important gaps in the literature, by making due allowance for the time series properties...

The economics profession in general, and economic forecasters in particular, have faced some understandable criticism for their failure to predict the timing and severity of the recent economic crisis. In this paper, we offer some assessment of the performance of the Economic Analysis conducted...

In this paper, we propose a framework to evaluate the information content of subjective expert density forecasts using micro data from the ECB’s Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF). A key aspect of our analysis is the use of scoring functions which evaluate the entire predictive...

We study interest rates transmission to savings at low and negative rates. Exploiting cohorts of consumers from a data-rich multi-country survey, we show how the strength of interest rate transmission to savings varies with the level of nominal interest rates. This response is positive when...

We propose to treat survey-based density expectations as compositional data when testing either for heterogeneity in density forecasts across different groups of agents or for changes over time. Monte Carlo simulations show that the proposed test has more power relative to both a bootstrap...