The establishment of the European Central Bank (ECB) presents a rare opportunity to define the operations of a central bank with no prior track record. Before the ECB specifies an, as yet undefined, operational target this paper asks what might be learnt from the recent experience of inflation...

In this Paper we compare alternative approaches for dating the euro area business cycle and analysing its characteristics. First, we extend a commonly used dating procedure to allow for length, size and amplitude restrictions, and to compute the probability of a phase change. Second, we apply...