Periods of economic and financial stress traditionally give rise to profound changes in economic theory and in the way policy decisions are taken. Motivated by the recent interest in renewing macroeconomics after the global financial crisis, we collected the views of senior central bank staff in...

Global monetary conditions have often been cited as a driving factor of commodity prices. This paper investigates the empirical relationship between US monetary policy and commodity prices by means of a standard VAR system, commonly used in analysing the effects of monetary policy shocks. The...

The impact of currency collapses (i.e. large nominal depreciations or devaluations) on real output remains unsettled in the empirical macroeconomic literature. This paper provides new empirical evidence on this relationship using a dataset for 108 emerging and developing economies for the period...

This paper reviews three different concepts of equilibrium exchange rates that are widely used in policy analysis and constitute the backbone of the IMF CGER assessment: the Macroeconomic Balance, the External Sustainability and the reduced form approaches. We raise a number of econometric...

Previous research has shown that the US business cycle leads the European cycle by a few quarters, and can therefore help predicting euro area GDP. We investigate whether financial variables provide additional predictive power. We use a VAR model of the US and the euro area GDPs and extend it to...

Bayesian approaches to the estimation of DSGE models are becoming increasingly popular. Prior knowledge is normally formalized either be information concerning deep parameters’ values (‘microprior’) or some macroeconomic indicator, e.g. moments of observable variables (‘macroprior’)....

This paper provides evidence on whether the creation of the euro has changed the way global turbulences a¤ect euro area and other economies. Specifically, it considers the impact of global shocks on the competitiveness of individual euro area countries and assesses whether their responses to...

In this paper, we assess whether and to what extent financial activity in the oil futures markets has contributed to destabilize oil prices in recent years. We define a destabilizing financial shock as a shift in oil prices that is not related to current and expected fundamentals, and thereby...