This paper establishes stylized facts on comovements and heterogeneity of individual euro area countries' output and price developments in the past two decades. For this purpose, a non-stationary structural dynamic factor model is fitted to a large dataset of euro area macroeconomic variables....

In this paper we discuss how the point and density forecasting performance of Bayesian vector autoregressions (BVARs) is affected by a number of specification choices. We adopt as a benchmark a common specification in the literature, a BVAR with variables entering in levels and a prior modeled...

The paper aims to identify those factors that cause changes in the speed and strength of the international transmission of output shocks from the USA to specified European economies. These factors are identified through the use of generalized impulse response functions conditioned on histories...

The empirical analysis of monetary policy requires the construction of instruments for future expected inflation. Dynamic factor models have been applied rather successfully to inflation forecasting. In fact, two competing methods have recently been developed to estimate large-scale dynamic...