Output gap revisions can be large even after many years. Real-time reliability tests might therefore be sensitive to the choice of the final output gap vintage that the real-time estimates are compared to. This is the case for the Federal Reserve's output gap. When accounting for revisions in...

This study examines whether and how important it is to adjust output gap frameworks during the COVID-19 pandemic and similar unprecedentedly large-scale episodes. Our proposed modelling framework comprises a Bayesian Structural Vector Autoregresion with an identification setup based on a...

Der Wachstumspfad der deutschen Wirtschaft flacht sich weiter ab. Am Ende des Projektionszeitraums im Jahr 2027 dürfte das Wachstum des Produktionspotenzials nur noch knapp 0,7 Prozent betragen. Damit würde es sich gegenüber seinem Zwischenhoch im Jahre 2017 halbieren. Hauptgrund ist der...

Das Wachstum des Produktionspotenzials in Deutschland flacht sich zunehmend ab und dürfte am Ende der Mittelfrist im Jahr 2026 nur noch knapp 0,8 Prozent betragen. Damit würde es sich gegenüber seinem Zwischenhoch im Jahre 2017 fast halbieren. Auch das Pro-Kopf-Wachstum wird in der mittleren...

Central banks face considerable uncertainty when conducting monetary policy. Some of the reasons for this include limitations of economic data, the unobservability of key macroeconomic variables such as potential output, structural changes to the economy and disagreements over the correct model...

Policy makers need to separate between temporary demand-driven shocks and permanent shocks in order to design optimal aggregate demand policies. In this paper we study the case of a central bank that ignores the presence of hysteresis when identifying shocks. By assuming that all low-frequency...

This study analyzes the relationships between domestic and foreign output gaps, current-account imbalances, and real effective exchange-rate (REER) misalignments. We first set up a theoretical framework based on the elasticities and absorption approaches of the balance of payments to derive and...

Assessing potential output and the output gap is essential for policy-making and fiscal surveillance. The European Commission proposes a production function methodology that involves the estimation of two classes of Gaussian state space models. This paper presents the R package RGAP which...

This paper estimates potential growth in Turkey using a production function estimation approach. Our approach aims to measure the inputs of production in the most detailed fashion that is possible and empirically addresses concepts of sustainable potential growth for Turkey. While developing...

Der Wachstumspfad der deutschen Wirtschaft flacht sich weiter ab. Am Ende des Projektionszeitraums im Jahr 2027 dürfte das Wachstum des Produktionspotenzials nur noch knapp 0,7 Prozent betragen. Damit würde es sich gegenüber seinem Zwischenhoch im Jahre 2017 halbieren. Hauptgrund ist der...

The German economy is an important economic driver in the Euro-area in terms of gross domestic product, labour force and international integration. We provide a state of the art estimate of the German output gap between 1995 and 2022 and present a nowcasting scheme that accurately predicts the...

Do technological improvements mitigate the potential damages from extreme weather events? We address this question using oil production and hurricane data from the Gulf of Mexico. We show that hurricane activity lowers well production and that stronger storms have larger impacts that persist for...

More than ten percent of Americans with recent work experience say they will continue social distancing after the COVID-19 pandemic ends, and another 45 percent will do so in limited ways. We uncover this Long Social Distancing phenomenon in our monthly Survey of Working Arrangements and...

Im Koalitionsvertrag der Bundesregierung ist festgehalten, dass die Details der Schuldenbremse und vor allem die Regeln zur Bestimmung des Produktionspotenzials überprüft werden sollen. Insbesondere die Methodik zur Berechnung der konjunkturellen Defi zite wird diskutiert, da diese...

The optimisation of the cyclical adjustment procedure under the German debt brake should focus on how to contribute to a democratically legitimate and sustainable fiscal policy. In this article, we discuss four criteria that should be satisfied: The method must (i) be sufficiently determined,...

In this article, we point out requirements for potential output estimates used for cyclical adjustment in the German debt brake. Further, we propose supplementing the cyclical component in the debt break with an error term - regardless of the specific potential output estimation approach. The...

In the production function-based approach proposed by the European Commission for the estimation of the potential output, trend total factor productivity (TFP) is indirectly estimated on the basis of cyclical factors. Instead, this article proposes a more economics-based foundation of trend-TFP...

Potential output is a measure of the longer-term production possibilities of an economy. Since this quantity cannot be observed directly, it must be determined on the basis of assumptions from existing data. The use of a production function was established in the European Commission's procedure...

More than ten percent of Americans with recent work experience say they will continue social distancing after the COVID-19 pandemic ends, and another 45 percent will do so in limited ways. We uncover this Long Social Distancing phenomenon in our monthly Survey of Working Arrangements and...

Using the measures proposed by Mink et al. (2012), we reexamine the coherence of business cycles in the euro area using a long sample period. We also analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on business cycle coherence and examine whether our measures for business cycle coherence indicate a...

We consider which labor market variables are the most informative for estimating and nowcasting the US output gap using a multivariate trend-cycle decomposition. Although the unemployment rate clearly contains important cyclical information, it also appears to reflect more persistent movements...

Das Wachstum des Produktionspotenzials in Deutschland flacht sich zunehmend ab und dürfte am Ende der Mittelfrist im Jahr 2026 nur noch knapp 0,8 Prozent betragen. Damit würde es sich gegenüber seinem Zwischenhoch im Jahre 2017 fast halbieren. Auch das Pro-Kopf-Wachstum wird in der mittleren...

We estimate the euro area output gap by applying the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition based on a large Bayesian vector autoregression. Our approach incorporates multivariate information through the inclusion of a wide range of variables in the analysis and addresses data issues associated with the...

The COVID-19 crisis has affected economic sectors very heterogeneously, with possible risks for permanent losses in some sectors. This paper presents a sectoral-level, bottom- up method to estimate euro area potential outputin order to assess the impact of the crisis on it. The estimates are...

The Taylor Rule is widely considered a useful tool to summarise the Fed’s policy, but the information set employed in practice to assess the state of economic activity is still an object of debate. The contribution of this paper is to provide evidence in favour of the following hypotheses....

Population aging is becoming a prominent issue in Asia, especially for developing countries where demographic changes have asserted a downward pressure on the rate of growth. This paper refers to such potential unwanted effects as an “aging tax” and analytically examines them from a...

Many problems plague the estimation of Phillips curves. Among them is the hurdle that the two key components, inflation expectations and the output gap, are both unobserved. Traditional remedies include creating reasonable proxies for the notable absentees or extracting them via some form of...

The measurement of potential output has been addressed in economics from the supply- and demand-side perspectives. The purpose of this study was to deepen the latter interpretation, focusing on market conditionalities and providing a macro-model (EUMOD21) as a computational tool. This empirical...

This paper builds an unobserved components model that combines a multivariate filter approach with a Cobb-Douglas production function. This combination allows potential output estimates to incorporate more economic structure than the traditional production function approach, while retaining the...

The budget dispute between Italy and the European Commission in 2018 gave new impetus for the debate about the reliability of output gap estimation methods and their use for calculating structural budget balances. In this paper we review the main properties of the mainstream approaches and...

The output gap is a key variable used to assess inflationary pressures in the economy, but estimates in real time are subject to uncertainty and often revised significantly. This paper assesses whether questions in the Bank of Canada's Business Outlook Survey (BOS) can provide useful signals for...

In Africa, a number of countries like South Africa have adopted inflation targeting. In Nigeria, different monetary policy regimes have been adopted over the years with rather unsatisfactory success. This study examines inflation targeting in Nigeria and South Africa, using fully modified least...

The output gap is a commonly used tool to assess the state of the business cycle, and as such, a key input for policy makers. In this article, we employ principal components analysis (PCA) to derive an estimate of the output gap in Finland that summarizes the information of widely used cyclical...

Korea's economy has leaped to high-income status thanks to several decades of sustained high growth. However, population aging and shifts in global demand provide headwinds for future growth and Korea now faces the effects of COVID-19 on economic activity. This paper asseses the expected drag on...

Deutschlands Wachstumsperspektiven verschlechtern sich aufgrund des demografischen Wandels deutlich. Das Produktionspotenzial wird Ende 2026 voraussichtlich nur noch um knapp 0,9 Prozent zunehmen. Damit läge das Wachstum über einen halben Prozentpunkt unter seinem langjährigen Durchschnitt....

This paper proposes a multi-level dynamic factor model to identify common components in output gap estimates. We pool multiple output gap estimates for 157 countries and decompose them into one global, eight regional, and 157 country-specific cycles. Our approach easily deals with mixed...