This paper employs a panel vector autoregressive model for the member countries of the Euro Area to explore the role of banks during the slump of the real economy that followed the financial crisis. In particular, we seek to quantify the macroeconomic effects of adverse loan supply shocks, which...

This study analyses the time-varying determinants of sovereign bond yield spreads between Q1/1999 and Q1/2010. Before the financial crisis, which started end of 2007, financial markets seemed to have had limited assessment of credit risks in sovereign bond markets and risk aversion did not play...

In the debate on global imbalances, the euro area countries did not receive much attention so far. While the current account is on balance for the entire area, divergences between individual member states have increased since the introduction of the common currency. In this paper, the imbalances...

With the global crisis, the policy stance around the world has been shaken by massive government and central bank efforts to prevent the meltdown of markets, banks, and the economy. Fiscal packages, in varied sizes, have been adopted throughout the world after years of proclaimed fiscal...

This paper proposes a new monetary policy framework for effectively navigating the path to adopting the euro. The proposed policy is based on relative inflation forecast targeting and incorporates an ancillary target of declining exchange rate risk, which is suggested as a key criterion for...

This paper empirically investigates the interplay between economic performance and policies in OECD countries. Macroeconomic theory focuses on supply policies as a key determinant of country?s economic performance. Aggregate demand can play a role only in the short-run. This view rests on the...

Forecasting current quarter GDP is a permanent task inside the central banks. Many models are known and proposed to solve this problem. Thanks to new results on the asymptotic normality of the multivariate k-nearest neighbor regression estimate, we propose an interesting and new approach to...

The global slowdown appears to have come to an end during the summer of 2009. Most countries saw a smaller decline in economic activity in the second quarter, with some economies even recording positive growth rates once again. In the U.S.A., the economic contraction moderated in the second...

This paper describes how we constructed a real time database for the euro area covering more than 200 series regularly published in the European Central Bank Monthly Bulletin, as made available ahead of publication to the Governing Council members before their first meeting of the month. We...

This Report analyses and compares a number of indicators related to the evolution of the competitive behaviour of firms in the Single Market, from 1999 to 2007, in a selected number of both manufacturing and services industries and eight EU countries: Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Poland,...