This paper considers the nature and the distribution of trade and FDI effects of a potential enlargement of the European Monetary Union (EMU) to the 10 countries that obtained EU membership in 2004. One-way and two-way error component gravity models are estimated using a data set of unbalanced...

This paper examines whether the Conference Board's Leading Economic Index (LEI) can be used for modeling and forecasting a more refined business cycle classification beyond the usual distinction between expansions and contractions. Univariate Markov-switching models for monthly coincident...

This paper revisits the accuracy of inflation forecasting using activity and expectations variables. We apply Bayesian model averaging across different regression specifications selected from a set of potential predictors that includes lagged values of inflation, a host of real activity data,...

This paper considers estimating the slope parameters and forecasting in potentially heterogeneous panel data regressions with a long time dimension. We propose a novel optimal pooling averaging estimator that makes an explicit trade-off between efficiency gains from pooling and bias due to...