Evidence suggests only a minority of American households feels "confident" about retirement saving adequacy. Little is known about why people fail to plan for retirement, and whether planning and information costs might affect retirement saving patterns. To better understand these issues, we...

This study explores whether the NAIRU is a useful indicator of prospects for inflation in the Netherlands. Apart from an empirical investigation, a review of the literature and various theories underlying the concept of the NAIRU are presented. The empirical results show that it is difficult to...

In this paper we discuss whether the introduction of the euro may cause price changes. Besides a critical survey of the theoretical arguments supporting price effects, we discuss the empirical evidence on price effects obtained from comparable events. Neither the theoretical arguments nor the...

The relationship between monetary indicators and inflation is ussually assumed to be linear, implying that looser monetary conditions always signal an increase in in.ation. Recently, money growth in the euro area surged while inflation remained comparatively subdued. This seems at variance with...

In this study we build two forecasting models to predict inflation for the Netherlands and for the euro area. Inflation is the yearly change of the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP). The models provide point forecasts and prediction intervals for both the components of the HICP and the...

Output gaps for 11 EU countries, the US and Japan are constructed based on measures of potential output derived from a CES production function. This production function accommodates differences in substitution elasticities between countries. Indeed, the empirical evidence shows that real wage...

The harmonized index of consumer prices allows for inflation comparisons between European countries. This report shows how backdata for this index and its subindices were constructed for the Netherlands.

Output gaps for 11 EU-countries, the US and Japan are constructed based on measures of potential output derived from a CES production technology. This technology accommodates differences in substitution elasticities between countries. Indeed, the empirical evidence shows that real wage...

Recently, it has often been argued that globalization eases the job of central banks as it helps to tame inflation. This is used to argue that central banks (particularly the ECB, referring to the objectives as laid down in the EU-Treaty) could or should reduce their efforts in the fight against...

Following the Maastricht criteria, a country seeking to join the European Monetary Union cannot have an inflation rate in excess of 1.5 percent plus the average inflation rates in the three 'best performing' EU countries. This inflation reference value is a non-increasing function of the number...