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...

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’)....

Thanks to recent findings based on survey data, it is now well known that firms differ from each other with respect to their price-reviewing strategies. While some firms review their prices at fixed intervals of time, others prefer to perform price revisions in response to changes in economic...

Infrequent price changes at the firm level are now well documented in the literature. However, a number of issues remain partly unaddressed. This paper contributes to the literature on price stickiness by investigating the lags of price adjustments to different types of shocks. We find that...

This paper presents the main findings of a survey conducted on a sample of Portuguese firms. The main aim was to identify some relevant characteristics about the dynamics of prices and wages in Portugal. The most important conclusions are: i) changes to wages are more synchronized than changes...

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...