The empirical relationship between money and output is one of the most studied issues in macroeconomics, and a large literature has examined the causal links between monetary variables and output. One puzzle from this literature is that the results of causality tests appear to be sensitive with...

The measurement of national income has added greatly to our understanding of economic and social change in Europe over the past hundred years. But national income analysis does not take full account of changes in welfare and particularly of the causes and effects of long-term changes in the...

The paper contributes to the debate on relative levels of living in the early modern world by estimating the income of and probable range of income growth in Bengal before European colonization. The exercise yields two conclusions, (a) average income in Bengal was significantly smaller than that...

This Paper is the result of the Bank of Italy-CEPR project to construct a monthly coincident indicator of the business cycle of the euro area. The index is estimated on the basis of a harmonized data set of monthly statistics of the euro area (951 series) which we constructed from a variety of...

This paper constructs a theoretical model to study the effects on employment of the introduction of flexible labour contracts (i.e. with low firing costs), which occurred in many European countries in the 1980s, which it then tests on Spanish data. The model predicts that such contracts increase...

This paper shows how particle filtering allows us to undertake likelihood-based inference in dynamic macroeconomic models. The models can be nonlinear and/or non-normal. We describe how to use the output from the particle filter to estimate the structural parameters of the model, those...

This paper models fluctuations in regional disaggregates as a non-stationary, dynamically evolving distribution. Doing so enables the study of the dynamics of aggregate fluctuations jointly with those of the rich cross-section of regional disaggregates. For the United States, the leading state...

Stochastic simulations are used on the Liverpool Model of the UK to assess the effect of macroeconomic stability of the UK adopting the Euro. Instability increases substantially, particularly for inflation and real interest rates. A key factor is the extent of the Euro's instability against the...

In this Paper we compare alternative approaches for dating the euro area business cycle and analysing its characteristics. First, we extend a commonly used dating procedure to allow for length, size and amplitude restrictions, and to compute the probability of a phase change. Second, we apply...