Using a general-equilibrium simulation model featuring nominal rigidities and monopolistic competition in product and labor markets, this paper estimates the macroeconomic benefits and international spillovers of an increase in competition. After calibrating the model to the euro area vs. the...

In this paper we study risk-neutral densities (RNDs) for the German stock market. The use of option prices allows us to quantify the risk-neutral probabilities of various levels of the DAX index. For the period from December 1995 to November 2001, we implement the mixture of log-normals model...

This paper provides new evidence on the behaviour of euro area aggregate loans to the private sector. Using a sample covering the last twenty years, a cointegrating vector linking the real stock of loans to a small set of domestic macroeconomic variables is found. Besides real GDP and prices,...

This paper extends the analysis of infinite dimensional vector autoregressive models (IVAR) proposed in Chudik and Pesaran (2010) to the case where one of the variables or the cross section units in the IVAR model is dominant or pervasive. This extension is not straightforward and involves...

To forecast an aggregate, we propose adding disaggregate variables, instead of combining forecasts of those disaggregates or forecasting by a univariate aggregate model. New analytical results show the effects of changing coefficients, mis-specification, estimation uncertainty and...

A small labour market model for the six largest euro area countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium) is estimated in a state -space framework. The model entails, in the long run, four driving forces: a trend labour force component, a trend labour productivity component,...

Bayesian approaches to the estimation of DSGE models are becoming increasingly popular. Prior knowledge is normally formalized either be information concerning deep parameters’ values (‘microprior’) or some macroeconomic indicator, e.g. moments of observable variables (‘macroprior’)....

The model presented here is a New estimated medium-scale Multi-Country Model (NMCM) which covers the five largest euro area countries and is used for forecasting and scenarios analysis at the European Central Bank. The model has a tight theoretical structure which allows for non-unitary...

Rational expectations has been the dominant way to model expectations, but the literature has quickly moved to a more realistic assumption of boundedly rational learning where agents are assumed to use only a limited set of information to form their expectations. A standard assumption is that...

We propose a method for estimating a subset of the parameters of a structural rational expectations model by exploiting changes in policy. We define a class of models, midway between a vector autoregression and a structural model, that we call the recoverable structure. As an application of our...