Due to the financial crises from 2008 to 2012, unconventional monetary policy caused an environment of record low interest rates around the world. Maintaining the low interest rate policy might be reasonable for the ECB in the short run in order to fight the fragmentation of the financial market...

Using OECD Composite Leading Indicators (CLI), we assess empirically whether the ability of the country-specific CLIs to predict economic activity has diminished in recent years, e.g. due to rapid advances in globalisation. Overall, we find evidence that the CLI encompasses useful information...