A rapid decrease in unemployment is a short-term priority to limit social problems and reduce the risk of rising structural unemployment. To this end, strengthening labour market policies to sustain labour demand is key. The public works programme should remain temporary and become more focused...

This article puts forward a framework based primarily on probabilistic tools to analyse the nature of housing loan cycles in France. The continued high growth rate of housing loans may indeed raise concerns as to the duration and determinants of the cycle which currently prevails. The results...

Although a forecasting model has very good statistical properties and the mean of the residuals equals zero, it can produce systematic errors during a short period. In the case of regular publications, forecasters want to prevent such a persistence of errors over several periods. For this...

recent years, the dynamics of M3 in the euro area have been driven by two factors: a strong preference for liquidity, observed between 2001 and 2003, followed by a normalisation, at a relatively moderate pace, of portfolio behaviour; as regards the counterparts, changes in M3 and net external...