In general, central banks are concerned with keeping the inflation rate stable while also sustaining output close to an efficient level. Under "inflation targeting", forecasts of the evolution of the general price level are an essential input for policy decisions and these are usually released...

We propose a new long-memory model with a time-varying fractional integration parameter, evolving non-linearly according to a Logistic Smooth Transition Autoregressive (LSTAR) specification. To estimate the time-varying fractional integration parameter, we implement a method based on the wavelet...

Economists often seek to estimate unobserved variables, representing “equilibrium” or “expected” values of economic variables, as benchmarks against which observed, realised values of these variables may be evaluated. Such comparisons are often used as economic policy indicators, for...

James Hamilton put doubt on the quality of the HP filter estimates, and proposed an alternative regression approach to decompose trend and cycle of time series (H filter). We investigate the new H filter in detail and compare it to the HP filter. We apply both to German GDP time series. We find...

This paper details the rationale and methodology behind the construction of the Persistent and Common Component of Inflation (PCCI), a measure of underlying inflation in the euro area. The PCCI reflects the view that underlying inflation captures widespread developments across the Harmonised...

We propose a multicountry quantile factor augmeneted vector autoregression (QFAVAR) to model heterogeneities both across countries and across characteristics of the distributions of macroeconomic time series. The presence of quantile factors allows for summarizing these two heterogeneities in a...

Assessing potential output and the output gap is essential for policy-making and fiscal surveillance. The European Commission proposes a production function methodology that involves the estimation of two classes of Gaussian state space models. This paper presents the R package RGAP which...

This paper establishes stylized facts about the cyclicality of real consumer wages and real producer wages in Germany. As detrending methods we apply the deterministic trend model, the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition, the Hodrick-Prescott filter, the Baxter-King filter and the structural time...

This article establishes stylized facts about the cyclicality of real consumer wages and real producer wages in Germany. As detrending methods, we apply the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition, the Hodrick-Prescott filter, the Baxter-King filter, and the structural time series model. The detrended...