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...

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...

The curse of dimensionality refers to the difficulty of including all relevant variables in empirical applications due to the lack of sufficient degrees of freedom. A common solution to alleviate the problem in the context of open economy models is to aggregate foreign variables by constructing...

The global financial crisis has led to a revival of the empirical literature on current account imbalances. This paper contributes to that literature by investigating the importance of evaluating model and parameter uncertainty prior to reaching any firm conclusion. We explore three alternative...

This paper studies the influence of aggregating across space when (i) testing the PPP theory or more generally pair-wise cointegration and (ii) evaluating the PPP puzzle. Our contribution is threefold: we show that aggregating foreign data and applying an ADF test may lead to erroneously reject...

The paper proposes a modelling approach for euro area goods and services trade volumes and prices on the basis of a break-down of trade data into their intra- and extra-area components. Using the evidence from the newly estimated trade equations, the paper gives new insights into two important...

The model presented here is an estimated medium-scale model for the United States (US) economy developed to forecast and analyse policy issues for the US. The model is specified to track the deviation of the medium- run developments from the balanced-growth-path via an estimated CES production...

This paper reviews potential output from a euro area perspective by summarising the developments according to international institutions and assessing the impact of the crisis. The paper also considers the methodological basis for potential output estimates, and the high degree of uncertainty...

In this paper, we analyze optimal monetary policy rules in a model of the euro area, namely the ECB’s Area Wide Model, which embodies a high degree of intrinsic persistence and a limited role for forward-looking expectations. These features allow us, in large measure, to differentiate our...

On the basis of historical data aggregated over the period 1973 to 2000, we estimated four different equilibrium exchange rate models for the synthetic euro. Using the same data set, variable definitions and sample period offers the possibility to assess the uncertainty surrounding such...