The study uses a bivariate unobserved components model for output and the unemployment rate in order to examine stylised facts of the cyclical behaviour of unemployment and to estimate the size of persistence. The model is applied to the U.S., Canada, and major European economies. Estimates of...

The study proposes a multivariate unobserved components model in order to examine relationships at business cycle frequencies among macroeconomic variables. The series are decomposed into non-stationary trends, stationary cycles, and an irregular component. The co-movements among the particular...

The paper extends the Shapiro-Stiglitz (1987) efficiency wage model by endogenising the probability of worker displacement as a function of the change in the firm's employment. This creates counter-cyclical variation in the wage mark-up and thereby generates real wage persistence. A New...

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 investigates the interrelations between monetary, macro- and microprudential policies. It first provides an overview of the three policies, starting with their main instruments and objectives. Monetary policy aims at maintaining price stability and promoting balanced economic growth,...

This paper studies the cyclical properties of real GDP, house prices, credit, and nominal liquid financial assets in 17 EU countries, by applying several methods to extract cycles. The estimates confirm earlier findings of large medium-term cycles in credit volumes and house prices. GDP appears...

We study the identification of policy shocks in Bayesian proxy VARs for the case that the instrument consists of sparse qualitative observations indicating the signs of certain shocks. We propose two identification schemes, i.e. linear discriminant analysis and a non-parametric sign concordance...

We study state dependence in the impact of monetary policy shocks over the leverage cycle for a panel of 10 euro area countries. We use a Bayesian Threshold Panel SVAR with regime classifications based on credit and house prices cycles. We find that monetary policy shocks trigger a smaller...

We present a quarterly narrative database of important labour market reforms in selected euro area economies in between 1995 and 2018 covering 60 events. We provide legal adoption and implementation dates of major reforms to employment protection legislation and unemployment benefits. Estimates...