We address the question of whether the heterogeneity in savings is partly due to differences in pension wealth across individuals and across countries, using a European harmonised wealth survey (HFCS) combined with estimates of pension wealth (OECD). First, we find significant displacement...

Fertility has long been declining in industrialised countries and the existence of public pension systems is considered as one of the causes. This paper provides detailed evidence based on historical data on the mechanism by which a public pension system depresses fertility. Our theoretical...

The paper focuses on the estimation of the euro area output gap. We construct model-averaged measures of the output gap in order to cope with both model uncertainty and parameter instability that are inherent to trend-cycle decomposition models of GDP. We first estimate nine models of...

This paper analyses the real-time forecasting performance of the New Keynesian DSGE model of Galí, Smets, and Wouters (2012) estimated on euro area data. It investigates to what extent forecasts of inflation, GDP growth and unemployment by professional forecasters improve the forecasting...

We compare direct forecasts of HICP and HICP excluding energy and food in the euro area and five member countries to aggregated forecasts of their main components from large Bayesian VARs with a shared set of predictors. We focus on conditional point and density forecasts, in line with...

This paper explores implications of climate change for fiscal policy by assessing the impact of large scale extreme weather events on changes in public budgets. We apply alternative measures for large scale extreme weather events and conclude that the budgetary impact of such events ranges...