The distributive trades, consisting of wholesaling and retailing, are a key sector of the economy. As the main interface between producers and consumers, the sector is particularly important from a monetary policy point of view: this is where most consumer goods prices are ultimately set....

In this paper, we explore the potential gains from alternative combinations of the surveyed forecasts in the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters. Our analysis encompasses a variety of methods including statistical combinations based on principal components analysis and trimmed means,...

The ECB’s price stability mandate has been defined by the Treaty. But the Treaty has not spelled out what price stability precisely means. To make the mandate operational, the Governing Council has provided a quantitative definition in 1998 and a clarification in 2003. The landscape has...

This report updates and extends earlier assessments of quantitative inflation perceptions and expectations of consumers in the euro area and the EU, using an anonymised micro data set collected by the European Commission in the context of the Harmonised EU Programme of Business and Consumer...

This paper analyses the predictive power of market-based and survey-based inflation expectations for actual inflation. We use the data on inflation swaps and the forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters for the euro area and the United States. The results show that both market-based...