Disentangling trend and cycle in the EUR-11 unemployment series

A variety of statistical methods and econometric techniques can be used attempting to disentangle the non-cyclical trend component of a time series and its purely cyclical part. This paper serves the purpose to demonstrate the potential contribution from the use of unobserved components modelling techniques to decompose the EUR-11 unemployment series. In general, unobserved components models appear to be an attractive and quite flexible tool to discriminate between the cyclical and the trend component in unemployment; in particular, the multivariate version of the model allows to use information contained in the price series to assist the decomposition of the unemployment rate. Consequently, this specification is potentially closer to the NAIRU concept than univariate filtering techniques.unemployment, nairu, trends, modelling

Inflation persistence in the European Union, the euro area, and the United States

In this paper we report results on inflation persistence using 79 inflation series covering the EU countries, the euro area and the US for five different inflation variables. The picture that emerges is one of moderate inflation persistence across the board. In particular we find euro area inflation persistence to be broadly in line with US inflation persistence. The issue of allowing for intercept dummies in the underlying inflation models is found to be of paramount importance to avoid overestimation of the level of persistence. The use of alternative measures of persistence is found to be commendable on the grounds that they complement each other in practice. JEL Classification: E31, E52, C22, C12Inflation Dynamics, median unbiased estimates, Structural change

Vortex rings for the Gross-Pitaevskii equation

n/

Sectoral specialisation in the EU a macroeconomic perspective

This paper analyses trends in sectoral specialisation in the EU and concludes the following: 1) The European production structure appears more homogenous than that of the US. 2) While sectoral specialisation has shown a slight increase in some smaller euro area countries towards the end-1990s, it is too early to detect any potential impact of EMU. 3) Despite some changes in sectoral composition, the business cycles of euro area countries became more synchronised over the 1990s, which may be seen as reassuring from the point of view of the single monetary policy. 4) Sectoral re-allocation accounts for as much as 50% of the increase in labour productivity growth in business sector services in the euro area. 5) The slowdown of European labour productivity growth relative to the US since the mid-1990s is explained by a stronger performance in the US wholesale and retail trade, financial intermediation and high-tech manufacturing sectors.

Dynamics of multiple degree Ginzburg\u2013Landau vortices

We prove that in two dimensions the gradient flow of the Ginzburg-Landau functional converge to the gradient flow of the Kirchhoff-Onsager interaction energy for vortice