The budget dispute between Italy and the European Commission in 2018 gave new impetus for the debate about the reliability of output gap estimation methods and their use for calculating structural budget balances. In this paper we review the main properties of the mainstream approaches and...

The budget dispute between Italy and the European Commission in 2018 gave new impetus for the debate about the reliability of output gap estimation methods and their use for calculating structural budget balances. In this paper we review the main properties of the mainstream approaches and...

Abstract Ideal point models have become a powerful tool for defining and measuring the ideology of many kinds of political actors, including legislators, judges, campaign donors, and members of the general public. We extend the application of ideal point models to the public using a novel data...

We assess the forecasting performance of the nowcasting model developed at the New York FED. We show that the observation regarding a striking difference in the model's predictive ability across business cycle phases made earlier in the literature also applies here. During expansions, the...

The budget dispute between Italy and the European Commission in 2018 gave new impetus for the debate about the reliability of output gap estimation methods and their use for calculating structural budget balances. In this paper we review the main properties of the mainstream approaches and...