Monitoring and forecasting price developments in the euro area is essential in the light of the second pillar of the ECBu0092s monetary policy strategy. This study analyses whether the forecasting accuracy of forecasting aggregate euro area inflation can be improved by aggregating forecasts of...

Standard measures of prices are often contaminated by transitory shocks. This has prompted economists to suggest the use of measures of underlying inflation to formulate monetary policy and assist in forecasting observed inflation. Recent work has concentrated on modelling large datasets using...

Based on a Financial Almost Ideal Demand System (FAIDS), this paper investigates the wealth structure of German households. The long-run wealth elasticities and interestrate elasticities were calculated using a unique new quarterly financial accounts macrodata set which covers the period from...

This paper proposes a new paradigm for the analysis of monetary policy. From an econometric point of view this new approach is just as easy to implement as reduced form analysis, but is robust to the Lucas critique. It requires no explicit prior theory and yet it encompasses all standard DSGE...

In Lisbon the European Council proclaimed a European growth strategy. It considers an average economic u0093growth rate of around 3 percent as a realistic prospect for the coming yearsu0094 and assigns public finances an important role in the process of achieving this goal. This paper addresses...

We quantify the degree of persistence in unemployment rates of transition countries using a variety of methods benchmarked against the EU. In part of the paper, we work with the concept of linear u0093Hysteresisu0094 as described by the presence of unit roots in unemployment. Since this is...

In this paper we study the zero frequency spectral properties of fractionally cointegrated long memory processes and introduce a new frequency domain principal components estimator of the cointegration space and the factor loading matrix for the long memory factors. We find that for fractionally...

This paper presents a set of probability density functions for Euribor outturns in three months’ time, estimated from the prices of options on Euribor futures. It is the first official and freely available dataset to span the complete history of Euribor futures options, thus comprising over...

This paper examines the feasibility of implementing Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) Control in structural cointegrated VAR models and sheds some light on the two major problems generated by such implementation. The first aspect to be taken into account is the effect of the presence of unit roots...