We analyse the pass-through of monetary policy measures to lending rates to firms and households in the euro area using a unique bank-level dataset. Bank balance sheet characteristics such as the capital ratio and the exposure to sovereign debt are responsible for the heterogeneity of...

Purpose – How many hours per week should workers in the USA and Germany spend at their paying jobs? The present paper aims to address this question by constructing policymakers' reaction functions capable of modelling the optimal length of working time as a function of the relevant labour...

This paper explores the role that the imperfect knowledge of the structure of the economy plays in the uncertainty surrounding the effects of rule-based monetary policy on unemployment dynamics in the euro area and the US. We employ a Bayesian model averaging procedure on a wide range of models...

This paper analyses whether active labour market policies (ALMPs) have differing effects on unemployment and employment dynamics according to the particular region in which they are implemented. To this end, it analyses alternative theoretical and econometric models thought to capture the...

The article analyses alternative approaches for dating the business cycles of a set of European monetary union (EMU) member states. First, the framework for analysing cyclical behaviour in economic activity is presented. Second, the dating algorithm is applied to both the classical cycle and the...

The aim of our experiments is to test the effect of different information settings on firms’ behaviour in duopoly price and quantity games. We find that, when players have full information on their rivals’ choices, the imitation rule prevails and such learning behaviour induces more...

This paper explores the role of model and vintage combination in forecasting, with a novel approach that exploits the information contained in the revision history of a given variable. We analyse the forecast performance of eleven widely used models to predict inflation and GDP growth, in the...

This paper explores the role that inflation forecasts play in the uncertainty surrounding the estimated effects of alternative monetary rules on unemployment dynamics in the euro area and the US. We use the inflation forecasts of 8 competing models in a standard Bayesian VAR to analyse the size...

Labour market policies settled at national level imply a “one-size-fits-all” labour market strategy. This strategy might not sufficiently take into account region-specific economic structures. In this paper we employ a panel factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR) to evaluate whether...

The topic covered in this paper is the performance of different monetary policy rules thought to be used as a guideline in practical policymaking. In this respect, different rules are estimated using alternative econometrics techniques. A comparative analysis based on the ability of the rules in...