The period of extraordinary volatility in euro area headline inflation starting in 2007 raised the question whether forecast combination methods can be used to hedge against bad forecast performance of single models during such periods and provide more robust forecasts. We investigate this issue...

The Eurosystem macroeconomic projection exercises are part of the input prepared for the Governing Council’s decision-making meetings. Under the economic analysis pillar of the ECB’s monetary policy strategy, they are a key element in the assessment of economic prospects and of the short to...

This paper analyses the transmission of financial shocks to the macroeconomy. The role of macro-financial linkages is investigated from an empirical perspective for the euro area as a whole, for individual euro area member countries and for other EU and OECD countries. The following key economic...

We propose two new procedures for comparing the mean squared prediction error (MSPE) of a benchmark model to the MSPEs of a small set of alternative models that nest the benchmark. Our procedures compare the bench-mark to all the alternative models simultaneously rather than sequentially, and do...

The literature on systems cointegration tests is reviewed and the various sets of assumptions for the asymptotic validity of the tests are compared within a general unifying framework. The comparison includes likelihood ratio tests, Lagrange multiplier and Wald type tests, lag augmentation...

This study analyses the transmission of monetary policy in Germany for the EMS period in the framework of a structural vector error correction model (S-VECM).Three stable cointegration relationships are found: a money demand relation, an interest rate spread and a stationary real interest rate....

In this work, we make use of the shifting-mean autoregressive model which is a flexible univariate nonstationary model. It is suitable for describing characteristic features in inflation series as well as for medium-term forecasting. With this model we decompose the inflation process into a...