Euro area countries as a whole have experienced a marked downward trend over the 1980s. Over this period, the unemployment rate has increased and economic activity has been sluggish. Changes in the implicit inflation target, viewed as low frequency movements of inflation, might possibly explain...

This work aims to analyse the dynamics of macroeconomic fluctuations in Cameroon and to determine the resulting business and growth cycles turning point chronology. The construction of a reference turning point chronology poses some problems related to the choice of the methods to be used. In...

La littérature sur l'instabilité macroéconomique couvre un champ extrêmement vaste qui se révèle par le spectre très large de mesures utilisées pour appréhender ce phénomène. Le choix de la mesure de l'instabilité macroéconomique apparait généralement peu discuté sous le...

This article aims at estimating leading indicators of the American economy with financial variables. We use two types of hidden Markov chains models, a quantitative one (Krolzig (1997)) and a qualitative one (Gregoir and Lenglart (2000)). These models provide a robust and reliable framework to...

We use a French firm-level panel data set over the period 1993-2004 to analyze the relationship between credit constraints and firms' R&D behavior over the business cycle. Our main results can be summarized as follows: (i) the share of R&D investment over total investment is countercyclical...

Le contraste entre le succès des années quatre-vingt et la stagnation et l'incertitude des années quatre-vingt-dix au Japon a suscité nombre d'interprétations. L'article procède à une revue de littérature selon le caractère réel ou au contraire monétaire et financier des facteurs de...

This paper presents the main improvements carried out to the macroeconometric model MZE since its creation in 2003. We have back-calculated the series over the period 1980-1995, in order to make the model more stable. To our knowledge, this paper is the first application of Kllians (1998) method...

This study compares the predictive performance of the conditional forecasting technique against the unconditional technique. The conditional technique consist of taking into account the information available on an endogenous variable over part of the forecast horizon. We develop a Bayesian VAR...

In order to provide medium run forecasts of headline and core HICP inflation for the euro area, we assess the usefulness of dynamic factor models. We use Stock and Watson's (1999) out-of-sample methodology for models estimated over the 1988:1-2002:3 period, with balanced and unbalanced panels....