Forecasting Inflation Across Euro Area Countries and Sectors: A Panel VAR Approach

AbstractForecasting inflation is of key relevance for central banks, not least because the objective of low and stable inflation is embodied in most central banks’ mandates and the monetary policy transmission mechanism is well known to be subject to long and variable lags. To our best knowledge, central banks around the world use conditional as well as unconditional forecasts for such purposes. Turning to unconditional forecasts, these can be derived on the basis of structural and non-structural models. Among the latter, vector autoregressive (VAR)-models are among the most popular tools.This study aims at assessing and deriving a set of unconditional forecasts for euro area inflation based on several specifications which take into account the information content of, inter alia, monetary and credit variables. The models are ordered and based on their in-sample performance and the “best” model is selected accordingly. The results indicate that the inclusion of money and credit variables in the information set improves the quality of the forecasts over a horizon of one to eight quarters. This supports the view that central banks should regularly monitor developments in money and credit.

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Effectiveness and channels of macroprudential policies: lessons from the Euro area

Journal of Financial Regulation and Compliance ◽

10.1108/jfrc-10-2016-0094 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 25 (3) ◽

pp. 271-306 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Yuanyan Zhang ◽

Thierry Tressel

Keyword(s):

Monetary Policy ◽

Euro Area ◽

Global Financial Crisis ◽

Bank Lending ◽

Panel Var ◽

Bank Capital ◽

Credit Growth ◽

Content Type ◽

Macroprudential Policies ◽

The Impact

Purpose The design of a macro-prudential framework and its interaction with monetary policy has been at the forefront of the policy agenda since the global financial crisis. However, most advanced economies (AEs) have little experience using macroprudential policies. As a result, relatively little is known empirically about macroprudential instruments’ effectiveness in mitigating systemic risks in these countries, about their channels of transmission, and about how these instruments would interact with monetary policy. This paper aims to fill in the gap. Design/methodology/approach The authors develop a new approach using the euro area bank lending survey to assess the effectiveness of macro-prudential policies in containing credit growth and house price appreciation in mortgage markets. Estimation is performed under the panel regressions (OLS, GLS) and panel VAR setup. Endogeneity issues arising from measures of macro-prudential policies are addressed by introducing GMM estimation and various instruments. Findings The authors find instruments targeting the cost of bank capital most effective in slowing down mortgage credit growth, and that the impact is transmitted mainly through price margins, the same banking channel as monetary policy. Limits on loan-to-value ratios are also effective, especially when monetary policy is excessively loose. Originality/value With limited data on macroprudential policy measures in the AEs, this paper proposed a new methodology of using answers from bank lending survey as proxies to assess the effectiveness of specific macroprudential measures and their transmission channels.

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