Using European Commission real-time data, we show that potential output (PO) estimates were substantially and persistently revised downwards after the Great Recession. We decompose PO revisions into revisions of the capital stock, trend labor, and trend total-factor productivity (TFP)....

To analyse the most important aspects of the Secular Stagnation hypothesis, this paper considers the effects of hysteresis in potential output in a New-Keynesian model that is extended with endogenous potential output. To do so, a number of simulations of relevant scenarios is undertaken. It is...

In this paper an Unobserved Components Model is employed to decompose U.S. real GDP into trend and cycle components. The main findings are that there exist three cycles with a period of about two, five and 13 years, respectively, and that the long-run development during the last 50 years can be...

In this paper, an Unobserved Components Model is employed to decompose German real GDP into the trend, cycle and seasonal components and the working day effect. The most important findings are: 1) The growth rate of potential output declined from 4.2 per cent in the sixties to 1.4 per cent at...

Output gaps (OG) identify economic cycles and the cyclical and structural components in government budget balances. A new simple method for estimating OGs is presented here. The new results are more transparent than those published by the leading economic policy institutions. - The retroactive...

We study how domestic and global output gaps affect CPI inflation. We use a New-Keynesian Phillips curve framework which controls for nonlinear exchange rate movements for a panel of 26 advanced and 22 emerging economies covering the 1994Q1-2017Q4 period. We find broadly that both global and...

This note examines the potential output gains from the implementation of optimal teacher incentive pay schemes, by calibrating the Hölmstrom and Milgrom (1987) hidden action model using data from Muralidharan and Sundararaman (2011), a teacher incentive pay experiment implemented in Andhra...

Greater international economic interconnectedness over recent decades has been changing inflation dynamics. This paper presents evidence that the expansion of global value chains (GVCs), ie cross-border trade in intermediate goods and services, is an important channel through which global...

This paper deals with the estimation of the output gap. We use uni- and bivariate unobserved components models in order to decompose the observed German GDP-series into trend, cycle and seasonal components. The results show that using the ifo business assessment variable as an indicator for the...

The budget dispute between Italy and the European Commission in 2018 gave new impetus for the debate about the reliability of output gap estimation methods and their use for calculating structural budget balances. In this paper we review the main properties of the mainstream approaches and...