Regis Barnichon, Paula Garda, (2016), “Forecasting unemployment across countries: The ins and outs”, European Economic Review, Volume 84, Μάϊος This paper evaluates the flow approach to unemployment forecasting proposed by Barnichon and Nekarda (2012) for a set of OECD countries characterized by very different labor markets. We find that the flow approach yields substantial improvements in forecast accuracy over professional forecasts for all countries, with especially large improvements at longer horizons (one-year …Read More

Tomasz Wieladek, (2016),“The European Central Bank’s QE: A new hope”, CEPR DP 11309, June Estimated on monthly data from 2012M6 to 2016M4. We assess the total impact via a counter-factual exercise, country-by-country and through alternative transmission channels. QE anouncement shocks are identified with four different identification schemes as in Weale and Wieladek (2016). We find that in absence of the first round of ECB QE, real GDP and core CPI …Read More

Elizaveta Krylova, (2016), “Determinants of euro-denominated corporate bond spreads”, ECB Working Paper 1912, June 2016 This paper computes time-varying indicators of the relative importance of different credit spread determinants, including rating, sector and country attribution as well as the coupon rate, maturity and liquidity on the basis of the comprehensive dataset of individual bonds. Additionally, it decomposes variances of rating-specific (country- and sector-specific) spread indices into the impacts of explanatory variables. …Read More

George Economides, Thomas Moutos, (2016), “Can Minimum Wages Raise Workers’ Incomes in the Long Run”, CESifo Working Paper No. 5913, May 2016 Using an intertemporal model of saving and capital accumulation with two types of agents (workers and capitalists) we demonstrate that it is impossible for any binding minimum wage to increase the after-tax incomes of workers if the production function is Cobb-Douglas with constant returns to scale, or if there …Read More