In this paper we present a novel approach to the empirical validation of the intertemporal approach to the current account. We develop a calibrated model highlighting the role of consumption smoothing and capital accumulation in the economic convergence process. After solving the model, we...

This paper brings three new insights into the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) debate. First, we show that a half-life PPP model is able to forecast real exchange rates (RER) better than the random walk (RW) model at both short and long-term horizons. Secondly, we find that this result holds only...

The paper provides a novel Bayesian methodological framework to estimate structural VAR (SVAR) models with recursive identification schemes that allows for the inclusion of over-identifying restrictions. The proposed framework enables the researcher to (i) elicit the prior on the non-zero...

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...

The contribution of this paper is to revisit the Early Warning System (EWS) literature by analysing selected episodes of financial market crisis, i.e. those preceded by a spell of credit and real estate expansions. The aim is to disentangle instances when this constitutes a natural phenomenon...

The enlargement of the European monetary union to include the accession countries (ACs) will not lead to higher average inflation in the enlarged euro area, but only to inflation redistribution across countries if continuity of the monetary policy framework is preserved. In the short term,...

This paper examines two competing approaches for calculating current account benchmarks, i.e. the external sustainability approach á la Lane and Milesi-Ferretti (LM) versus the structural current accounts literature (SCA) based on panel econometric techniques. The aim is to gauge the medium...

This paper examines the welfare implications of a country joining a currency union as opposed to operating in a flexible exchange rate regime. At the country level, the suboptimal response to domestic and foreign shocks and the inability of setting inflation at the desired level may be offset by...

From a conceptual point of view there is little consensus of what should be the “ideal indicator” of international cost and price competitiveness as each of the standard measures typically employed has its own merits and drawbacks. This calls for addressing the question from an empirical...

This paper investigates the economic impact of technological innovation, focusing on generative AI (GenAI) following ChatGPT's release in November 2022. We propose a novel framework leveraging large language models to analyze earnings call transcripts. Our method quantifies firms' GenAI exposure...