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Europe > Ireland

You are looking at 1 - 4 of 4 items for :

  • Type: Journal Issue x
  • Forecasting and Other Model Applications x
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Cover IMF Working Papers
Unemployment Surges in the EU: The Role of Risk Premium Shocks
Mr. Bas B. Bakker
,
Marta Korczak
, and
Mr. Krzysztof Krogulski
In the last decade, over half of the EU countries in the euro area or with currencies pegged to the euro were hit by large risk premium shocks. Previous papers have focused on the impact of these shocks on demand. This paper, by contrast, focuses on the impact on supply. We show that risk premium shocks reduce the output level that maximizes profit. They also lead to unemployment surges, as firms are forced to cut costs when financing becomes expensive or is no longer available. As a result, all countries with risk premium shocks saw unemployment surge, even as euro area core countries managed to contain unemployment as firms hoarded labor during the downturn. Most striking, wage bills in euro area crisis countries and the Baltics declined even faster than GDP, whereas in core euro area countries wage shares actually increased.
Keywords:
WP; risk premium shock; risk premium; interest rate; GDP; Risk premia; interest rates; Euro area crisis; global economic; fincanial crisis; debt ratio; risk premium surge; unemployment surge; financing cost; Return on investment; Unemployment; Employment; Sovereign bonds; Baltics
Cover IMF Working Papers
Does Money Growth Granger-Cause Inflation in the Euro Area? Evidence from Out-of-Sample Forecasts Using Bayesian VARs
Pär Österholm
and
Mr. Helge Berger
We use a mean-adjusted Bayesian VAR model as an out-of-sample forecasting tool to test whether money growth Granger-causes inflation in the euro area. Based on data from 1970 to 2006 and forecasting horizons of up to 12 quarters, there is surprisingly strong evidence that including money improves forecasting accuracy. The results are very robust with regard to alternative treatments of priors and sample periods. That said, there is also reason not to overemphasize the role of money. The predictive power of money growth for inflation is substantially lower in more recent sample periods compared to the 1970s and 1980s. This cautions against using money-based inflation models anchored in very long samples for policy advice.
Keywords:
WP; money; Bayesian vector autoregressive; money growth
Cover IMF Working Papers
Does Money Matter for U.S. Inflation? Evidence from Bayesian VARs
Pär Österholm
and
Mr. Helge Berger
We use Bayesian estimation techniques to investigate whether money growth Granger-causes inflation in the United States. We test for Granger-causality out-of-sample and find, perhaps surprisingly given recent theoretical arguments, that including money growth in simple VAR models of inflation does systematically improve out-of-sample forecasting accuracy. This holds for a long forecasting sample 1960-2005, as well for more recent subperiods, including the Volcker and Greenspan eras. However, the contribution of money to inflation forecasting accuracy is quantitatively limited and tends to be smaller in recent subperiods, in particular in models that also include information on real GDP growth and interest rates.
Keywords:
WP; money; money growth; interest rate
Cover IMF Working Papers
Inflation Targeting Under Asymmetric Preferences
Mr. Francisco Javier Ruge-Murcia
This paper develops and estimates a game-theoretical model of inflation targeting where the central banker's preferences are asymmetric around the targeted rate. Specifically, positive deviations from the target can be weighted more, or less, severely than negative ones in the central banker's loss function. It is shown that some of the previous results derived under the assumption of symmetry are not robust to this generalization of preferences. Estimates of the central banker's preference parameters for Canada, Sweden, and the United Kingdom are statistically different from the one implied by the commonly-used quadratic loss function.
Keywords:
WP; rate of inflation; inflation targets; asymmetric preferences; credibility; natural rate of unemployment; standard error; unemployment process; inflation deviation; Phillips curve; Inflation; Inflation targeting; Unemployment rate; Unemployment; Global