Lucrezia Reichlin

London Business School · Department of Economics

This essay reviews 21 st Century Monetary Policy: The Federal Reserve from the Great Inflation to COVID-19 by Ben Bernanke, a fascinating account of the evolution of the Fed since the 1950s, and a stalwart defense of the status quo: of the Fed’s remit, its independence, and the tools and practices it now uses to pursue its mandate. The essay suppor...

We study the monetary–fiscal mix in the European Monetary Union. The medium and long-run effects of conventional and unconventional monetary policy are analysed by combining monetary policy shocks identified in a Structural VAR, and the general government budget constraint featuring a single central bank and multiple fiscal authorities. In response...

A mixed-frequency semi-structural model is used for estimating unobservable quantities such as the output gap, the Phillips curve and the NAIRU in real time. We consider two specifications: in one the output gap is observed as the official CBO measure, in the other is unobserved and derived via minimal theory-based restrictions. We find that the CB...

This paper develops a nowcasting model for the German economy. The model outperforms a number of alternatives and produces forecasts not only for GDP but also for other key variables. We show that the inclusion of a foreign factor improves the model’s performance, while financial variables do not. Additionally, a comprehensive model averaging exerc...

We develop a medium-size semi-structural time series model of inflation dynamics that is consistent with the view – often expressed by central banks – that three components are important: a trend anchored by long-run expectations, a Phillips curve and temporary fluctuations in energy prices. We find that a stable long-term inflation trend and a wel...

We develop a medium-size semi-structural time series model of inflation dynamics that is consistent with the view - often expressed by central banks - that three components are important: a trend anchored by long-run expectations, a Phillips curve and temporary fluctuations in energy prices. We find that a stable long-term inflation trend and a wel...

This paper highlights the anomalous characteristics of the Euro Area ‘twin crises’ by contrasting the aggregate macroecosnomic dynamics in the period 2009–2013 with the business cycle fluctuations of the previous decades. We report three novel stylised facts. First, the contraction in output was marked by an anomalous downfall in private investment...

This paper analyses bank balance sheet data in conjunction with macroeconomic and other financial variables. Our aim is to understand the nature of the instability in financial intermediation in the euro area during the recent financial crises. We define “large changes” as significant departures in the actual evolution of balance sheet variables du...

Eurozone economies are expanding, but is it really the time to celebrate? Lucrezia Reichlin and Hélène Rey warn of dangers ahead

If treated as a single economy, the European Union is the largest in the world, with an estimated GDP of over 14 trillion euros. Despite its size, European economic policy has often lagged behind the rest of the world in its ability to generate growth and innovation. Much of the European economic research itself often trails behind that of the USA,...

An ultra-accommodative monetary policy brings with it long-term risks to the stability of the financial system. First, because of the mounting risk of financial market bubbles, … [and] second, because profitability in the banking sector can take a hit. Dr Jens Weidmann, president of the Deutsche Bundesbank Introduction Central bank balance sheets i...

A quarterly stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model is combined with a now-casting model designed to read timely monthly information as it becomes available. This implies (1) mapping the structural quarterly DSGE with a monthly version that maintains the same economic restrictions; (2) augmenting the model with a richer data set and (3) updatin...

The paper is a narrative on monetary policy and the banking sector during the two recent euro area recessions. It shows that while in the two episodes of recession and financial stress the ECB acted aggressively providing liquidity to banks, the second recession, unlike the first, has been characterized by an abnormal decline of loans with respect...

This paper analyses the impact on the macroeconomy of the ECB’s non-standard monetary policy implemented in the aftermath of the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the Fall of 2008. We study in particular the effect of the expansion of the intermediation of transactions across central bank balance sheets as dysfunctional financial markets seize up, whi...

The term now-casting is a contraction for now and forecasting and has been used for a long-time in meteorology and recently also in economics In this paper we survey recent developments on economic now-casting with special focus on those models that formalize key features of how market participants and policy makers read macroeconomic data releases...

This paper uses a data-set including time series data on macroeconomic variables, loans, deposits and interest rates for the euro area in order to study the features of financial intermediation over the business cycle. We find that stylized facts for aggregate monetary and real variables are remarkably similar to what has been found for the US by m...

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This paper undertakes a modern event-study analysis of Operation Twist and uses its estimated effects to assess what should be expected for the recent policy of quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve, dubbed "QE2." The paper first shows that Operation Twist and QE2 are similar in magnitude. It then identifies six significant, discrete announcem...

Economists have imperfect knowledge of the present state of the economy and even of the recent past. Many key statistics are released with a long delay and they are subsequently revised. As a consequence, unlike weather forecasters, who know what is the weather today and only have to predict the weather tomorrow, economists have to forecast the pre...

Standard accounts of the Great Depression attribute an important causal role to monetary policy errors in accounting for the catastrophic collapse in economic activity observed in the early 1930s. While views vary on the relative importance of money versus credit contraction in the propagation of this policy error to the wider economy and ultimatel...

This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection a...

This paper describes the way in which the European Central Bank (ECB), the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England conducted monetary policy since the beginning of the financial crisis in August 2007. We argue that both quantitative easing -- and the other non-standard measures introduced by central banks that changed the composition of the asset s...

This chapter investigates changes induced by the single currency on the business cycles of member countries. It produces forecasts of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita of each euro member country, conditional on their per-EMU structure and the observed path of euro area-wide growth. This study finds that in the first ten years, business cycle...

This paper shows that vector auto regression (VAR) with Bayesian shrinkage is an appropriate tool for large dynamic models. We build on the results of De Mol and co-workers (2008) and show that, when the degree of shrinkage is set in relation to the cross-sectional dimension, the forecasting performance of small monetary VARs can be improved by add...

This volume celebrates the work of Michael Woodford and his many contributions to economics. One of Mike's most influential papers is the 1997 paper (co-authored with Julio Rotemberg) “An optimization-based econometric framework for the evaluation of monetary policy.” This paper constituted the first attempt at estimation of a small scale dynamic...

This paper describes the way in which the European Central Bank (ECB), the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England conducted monetary policy since the beginning of the financial crisis in August 2007. We argue that both quantitative easing - and the other non-standard measures introduced by central bank that changed the composition of the asset sid...

This paper assesses the role of qualitative surveys for the early estimation of GDP in the Euro Area in a model-based automated procedure which exploits the timeliness of their release. The analysis is conducted using both an historical evaluation and a real-time case study on the current conjuncture.

This paper assesses the practical experience of monetary analysis at the ECB from the introduction of the euro in 1999 through 2006. The paper exploits a unique and rich real-time data set, containing both the vintages of data and the economic models that have been employed in the ECB's monetary analysis during the first eight years of Monetary Uni...

We introduce a new hybrid approach to joint estimation of Value at Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES) for high quantiles of return distributions. We investigate the relative performance of VaR and ES models using daily returns for sixteen stock market indices (eight from developed and eight from emerging markets) prior to and during the 2008 fi...

The paper decomposes GDP both in terms of level per capita and growth rate, so as to identify the sources of income differences and of economic growth for all EU27 member states. This accounting approach has multiple advantages, although a number of substantial caveats should be borne in mind when interpreting the results. In particular, the detail...

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This paper evaluates models that exploit timely monthly releases to compute early estimates of current quarter GDP (now-casting) in the euro area. We compare traditional methods used at institutions with a new method proposed by Giannone, Reichlin, and Small (2005). The method consists in bridging quarterly GDP with monthly data via a regression on...

This paper considers Bayesian regression with normal and double-exponential priors as forecasting methods based on large panels of time series. We show that, empirically, these forecasts are highly correlated with principal component forecasts and that they perform equally well for a wide range of prior choices. Moreover, we study conditions for co...

Monetary policies of the ECB and US Fed can be characterised by Taylor rules, that is both central banks seem to be setting rates by taking into account the output gap and inflation. We also set up and tested Taylor rules which incorporate money growth and the euro-dollar exchange rate, thereby improving the fit between actual and Taylor rule based...

A formal method is developed for evaluating the marginal impact that intra-monthly data releases have on current-quarter forecasts (nowcasts) of real gross domestic product (GDP) growth. The method can track the real-time flow of the type of information monitored by central banks because it can handle large data sets with staggered data-release dat...

This paper shows that Vector Autoregression with Bayesian shrinkage is an appropriate tool for large dynamic models. We build on the results by De Mol, Giannone, and Reichlin (2008) and show that, when the degree of shrinkage is set in relation to the cross-sectional dimension, the forecasting performance of small monetary VARs can be improved by a...

This paper shows that the explanation of the decline in the volatility of GDP growth since the mid 1980s is not the decline in the volatility of exogenous shocks but rather a change in their propagation mechanism. (JEL: E32, E37, C32, C53) (c) 2008 by the European Economic Association.

We propose new information criteria for impulse response function matching estimators (IRFMEs). These estimators yield sampling distributions of the structural parameters of dynamic sto- chastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models by minimizing the distance between sample and theoretical impulse responses. First, we propose an information criterion t...

This paper assesses the performance of Bayesian Vector Autoregression (BVAR) for models of different size. We consider standard specifications in the macroeconomic literature based on, respectively, three and eight variables and compare results with those obtained by larger models containing twenty or over one hundred conjunctural indicators. We fi...

In this paper the authors present the results of preliminary estimates on the effects of changes in the composition of labour forces throughout eight OECD countries during the period 1966-1986. The analysis proceeds in two steps. First, the effect of changes in the distribution of the labour force on group unemployment is computed. Second, the impa...

This paper shows how large-dimensional dynamic factor models are suitable for structural analysis. We establish sufficient conditions for identification of the structural shocks and the associated impulse-response functions. In particular, we argue that, if the data follow an approximate factor structure, the “problem of fundamentalness”, which is...

This paper shows consistency of a two-step estimation of the factors in a dynamic approximate factor model when the panel of time series is large (n large). In the first step, the parameters of the model are estimated from an OLS on principal components. In the second step, the factors are estimated via the Kalman smoother. The analysis develops th...

This paper considers Bayesian regression with normal and doubleexponential priors as forecasting methods based on large panels of time series. We show that, empirically, these forecasts are highly correlated with principal component forecasts and that they perform equally well for a wide range of prior choices. Moreover, we study the asymptotic pro...

Matching university places to students is not as clear cut or as straightforward as it ought to be. By investigating the matching algorithm used by the German central clearinghouse for university admissions in medicine and related subjects, we show that a procedure designed to give an advantage to students with excellent school grades actually harm...

This paper considers quasi-maximum likelihood estimations of a dynamic approximate factor model when the panel of time series is large. Maximum likelihood is analyzed under different sources of misspecification: omitted serial correlation of the observations and cross-sectional correlation of the idiosyncratic components. It is shown that the effec...

This paper asks two questions. First, can we detect empirically whether the shocks recovered from the estimates of a structural vector autoregression are truly structural? Second, can the problem of non-fundamentalness be solved by considering additional information? The answer to the first question is “yes” and that to the second is “under some co...

Recent tendency in academic work and at central banks is to develop and estimate large DSGE models for policy analysis and forecasting. These models typically have many shocks (e.g. Smets and Wouters, 2003 and Adolfson, Laseen, Linde and Villani, 2005). On the other hand, empirical studies suggest that few large shocks are sufficient to capture the...

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Since unification, the debate about Germany's poor economic performance has focused on supply-side weaknesses, and the associated reform agenda sought to make low-skill labour markets more flexible. We question this diagnosis using three lines of argument. First, effective restructuring of the supply side in the core advanced industries was carried...

This article proposes a new forecasting method that makes use of information from a large panel of time series. Like earlier methods, our method is based on a dynamic factor model. We argue that our method improves on a standard principal component predictor in that it fully exploits all the dynamic covariance structure of the panel and also weight...

This paper proposes a new core inflation indicator for the euro area, obtained by "cleaning" monthly price changes from short-run volatility, idiosyncratic, and measurement errors. We use a factor model to "project" monthly inflation on a large panel of time series. Exploiting multivariate information we obtain a satisfactory degree of smoothing wi...

We analyse the panel of the Greenbook forecasts (sample 1970-96) and a large panel of monthly variables for the US (sample 1970-2003) and show that the bulk of dynamics of both the variables and their forecasts is explained by two shocks. Moreover, a two factor model which exploits, in real time, information on many time series to extract a two dim...

This Paper proposes a new forecasting method that exploits information from a large panel of time series. The method is based on the generalized dynamic factor model proposed in Forni, Hallin, Lippi, and Reichlin (2000), and takes advantage of the information on the dynamic covariance structure of the whole panel. We first use our previous method t...

The asymptotic distributions of cointegration tests are approximated using the Gamma distribution. The tests considered are for the I(1), the conditional I(1), as well as the I(2) model. Formulae for the parameters of the Gamma distributions are derived from response surfaces. The resulting approximation is flexible, easy to implement and more accu...

A factor model generalizing those proposed by Geweke (in: D.J. Aigner and A.S. Goldberger, Latent Variables in Socio-Economic Models, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1977), Sargent and Sims (New Methods in Business Research, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Minneapolis, 1977), Engle and Watson (J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 76 (1981) 774) and Stock and Wa...

Equilibrium business cycle models have typically less shocks than variables. As pointed out by Altug, 1989, and Sargent, 1989, if variables are measured with error, this characteristic implies that the model solution for measured variables has a factor structure. This Paper compares estimation performance for the impulse response coefficients based...

This paper uses a large data set, consisting of 447 monthly macroeconomic time series concerning the main countries of the Euro area to simulate out-of-sample predictions of the Euro-area industrial production and the harmonized inflation index and to evaluate the role of financial variables in forecasting. We considered two models which allow fore...

Equilibrium business cycle models have typically less shocks than variables. As pointed out by Altug (1989) International Economic Review 30 (4) 889–920 and Sargent (1989) The Journal of Political Economy 97 (2) 251–287, if variables are measured with error, this characteristic implies that the model solution for measured variables has a factor str...

Economic forecasts, in particular the forecasts for inflation, are an important part of the monetary policy formulation process at the Reserve Bank. The forecasts from a range of statistical models provide an important cross check for the forecasts produced by the main policy model that supports the policy deliberation process. This article describ...