Much has been written about why economists failed to predict the latest financial and real crisis. Reading the recent literature, it seems that the crisis was so obvious that economists must have been blind when looking at data not to see it coming. In this paper, we analyze whether such claims...

This study investigates changes in the relationship between oil prices and the US economy from a long-term perspective. Although neither of the two series (oil price and GDP growth rates) presents structural breaks in mean, we identify different volatility periods in both of them, separately....

Although there is a vast literature on GDP comovement across countries, there is scant evidence on inflation interdependence. We analyze inflation comovements across a wide set of advanced economies and across the subset of euro area countries. Some of our findings are expected, such as the fact...

This paper proposes a new approach to the analysis of the reference cycle turning points, defined on the basis of the specific turning points of a broad set of coincident economic indicators. Each individual pair of specific peaks and troughs from these indicators is viewed as a realization of a...

This paper provides an accurate chronology of the Spanish reference business cycle by adapting the multiple change-point model proposed by Camacho, Gadea and Gómez Loscos (2021). In that approach, each individual pair of specific peaks and troughs from a set of indicators is viewed as a...

A decade after the beginning of the Great Recession, flow external imbalances, measured by the current account (CA) have narrowed markedly. However, stock or net foreign assets (NFA) imbalances have kept increasing and have created challenges for future macroeconomic and financial stability. To...

We present evidence about the loss of the so-called "plucking effect", that is, a high-growth phase of the cycle typically observed at the end of recessions. This result matches the belief, presented informally by different authors, that recession may have now permanent effects, or recession...

We document a rise and fall of the natural interest rate (r*) for several advanced economies, which starts increasing in the 1960's and peaks around the end of the 1980's. We reach this conclusion after showing that the Laubach and Williams (2003) model cannot estimate r* accurately when either...

We show that an extension of the Markov-switching dynamic factor models that accounts for the specificities of the day to day monitoring of economic developments such as ragged edges, mixed frequencies and data revisions is a good tool to forecast the Euro area recessions in real time. We...

We examine the short-term performance of two alternative approaches to forecasting using dynamic factor models. The first approach extracts the seasonal component of the individual indicators before estimating the dynamic factor model, while the alternative uses the non-seasonally adjusted data...