This paper investigates determinants of convergence in GDP per capita in the euro area and the EU between 1995 and 2021. It finds that the COVID-19 crisis temporarily slowed convergence but the estimated negative impact is significantly smaller than during the global financial crisis. Diverging...

Dieser Beitrag diskutiert die Grundlagen des P*-Ansatzes und vergleicht seine Prognoseleistung mit derjenigen nicht-monetärer Inflationsindikatoren für den Euro-Raum. Die Relevanz der Quantitätstheorie, die Stabilität der Geldnachfrage und die Rolle von Geldmengen im Transmissionsmechanismus...

Forecasts from dynamic factor models potentially benefit from refining the data set by eliminating uninformative series. The paper proposes to use forecast weights as provided by the factor model itself for this purpose. Monte Carlo simulations and an empirical application to forecasting euro...

This paper evaluates different models for the short-term forecasting of real GDP growth in ten selected European countries and the euro area as a whole. Purely quarterly models are compared with models designed to exploit early releases of monthly indicators for the nowcast and forecast of...

We derive forecast weights and uncertainty measures for assessing the role of individual series in a dynamic factor model (DFM) to forecast euro area GDP from monthly indicators. The use of the Kalman filter allows us to deal with publication lags when calculating the above measures. We find...

Euro area GDP and components are nowcast and forecast one quarter ahead. Based on a dataset of 163 series comprising the relevant monthly indicators, simple bridge equations with one explanatory variable are estimated for each. The individual forecasts generated by each equation are then pooled,...

In this paper we propose a methodology to estimate a dynamic factor model on data sets with an arbitrary pattern of missing data. We modify the Expectation Maximisation (EM) algorithm as proposed for a dynamic factor model by Watson and Engle (1983) to the case with general pattern of missing...

This paper performs an empirical analysis of the international cross sectional distribution of gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates and business cycles. We consider a balanced panel of 91 countries in the period 1960-2010 and two different measures of GDP fluctuations: the logarithmic...