Marta Bańbura

• European Central Bank

In light of recent global economic and geopolitical shocks threatening trade openness, this report aims to shed light on geoeconomic fragmentation and develops a rich set of new tools to assess its economic effects and implications for central banks. The report shows that, although global trade integration has largely withstood recent disruptions a...

In light of recent global economic and geopolitical shocks threatening trade openness, this report aims to shed light on geoeconomic fragmentation and develops a rich set of new tools to assess its economic effects and implications for central banks. The report shows that, although global trade integration has largely withstood recent disruptions a...

We find that it does, but choosing the right specification is not trivial. Based on an extensive forecast evaluation we document notable forecast instabilities for most simple Phillips curves. Euro area inflation was particularly hard to forecast in the run-up to the Economic and Monetary Union and after the sovereign debt crisis, when the trends—a...

This paper summarises the findings of the Eurosystem’s Expert Group on Inflation Expectations (EGIE), which was one of the 13 work streams conducting analysis that fed into the ECB’s monetary policy strategy review. The EGIE was tasked with (i) reviewing the nature and behaviour of inflation expectations, with a focus on the degree of anchoring, an...

This paper summarises the findings of the Eurosystem’s Expert Group on Inflation Expectations (EGIE), which was one of the 13 work streams conducting analysis that fed into the ECB’s monetary policy strategy review. The EGIE was tasked with (i) reviewing the nature and behaviour of inflation expectations, with a focus on the degree of anchoring, an...

The article analyses recent developments in business investment for a large group of EU countries, using a broad set of analytical tools and data sources. We find that the assessment of whether or not investment is currently low varies across benchmarks and countries. At the euro area level and for most countries, the level of business investment i...

This paper describes an algorithm for computing the distribution of conditional forecasts, i.e., projections of a set of variables of interest on future paths of some other variables, in dynamic systems. The algorithm is based on Kalman filtering methods and is computationally viable for large models that can be cast in a linear state space represe...

In this paper we propose a methodology to estimate a dynamic factor model on data sets with an arbitrary pattern of missing data. We modify the Expectation Maximisation (EM) algorithm as proposed for a dynamic factor model by Watson and Engle (1983) to the case with general pattern of missing data. We also extend the model to the case with serially...

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 Chapter deals with the estimation of a large dynamic factor model on datasets with a general pattern of missing data. The framework allows to handle efficiently and in a fairly automatic manner sets of indicators characterized by different publication delays, frequencies and sample lengths. This can be relevant e.g. for young economies for whi...

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...

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...

We estimate and forecast growth in euro area monthly GDP and its components from the dynamic factor model of Doz et al. (2006), which handles unbalanced data sets in an efficient way. We extend the model to integrate interpolation and forecasting with cross-equation accounting identities. A pseudo real-time forecasting exercise indicates that the m...

We estimate and forecast growth in euro area monthly GDP and its components from a dynamic factor model due to Doz et al. (2005), which handles unbalanced data sets in an efficient way. We extend the model to integrate interpolation and forecasting together with cross-equation accounting identities. A pseudo real-time forecasting exercise indicates...

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...

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...

We derive forecast weights and uncertainty measures for assessing the roles of individual series in a dynamic factor model (DFM) for forecasting the euro area GDP from monthly indicators. The use of the Kalman smoother allows us to deal with publication lags when calculating the above measures. We find that surveys and financial data contain import...