EABC DATING COMMITTEE CONFERENCE ON FINDING THE GAP

Potential output and the output gap play an essential role - both in theory and in practice - in evaluating the state of an economy as well as in forming and assessing macroeconomic policies. For example, the output gap is often considered a measure of inflationary pressures in the economy. And potential output and the output gap help observers assess whether the source of economic growth is a change in long-run trends or is, instead, due to cyclical factors. Despite its importance as a measure of aggregate macroeconomic conditions and inflationary pressures, the output gap is unobservable, which forces researchers and policy-makers to depend on estimates. The tools available to extract unobservable variables are typically statistical and, hence, may correspond imperfectly with the concept of gaps in the economic models that are used to interpret them.

 

With these in mind, the Euro Area Business Cycle Dating Committee is organizing a conference on potential output and output gap measurement. The workshop is calling for papers that can shed light on how theoretical and statistical concepts of potential output and the output gap relate and how to measure them in practice. The focus is the Euro Area - either taken as a whole or, possibly, for different constituent countries. It would also be of great interest to the committee to have estimates on the relationship between cyclical fluctuations extracted with different methods and gaps.
 

For CEPR members and those registered with the CEPR website, please submit your paper via the CEPR online system by visiting the call for papers webpage by December 1, 2019.
If you do not have a personal profile to use you can create one here.
If you have any difficulty in applying, please contact Mariolina Ciccone in the CEPR events team (mciccone@cepr.org) mentioning in the subject line "40042 - EABC Dating Committee Conference ".
Only authors of accepted papers will be notified. Travel and accommodation expenses of accepted authors will be covered by the organizers.