To assess the predictive content of the interest rate term spread for future economic growth, we distinguish short-run from long-run predictability by using two different approaches. First, following Dufour and Renault (1998) a test procedure is proposed to test for causality at different...

Recent investigations of the transmission mechanism of German monetary policy arrive at quite different conclusions regarding its stability during the period of monetary targeting by the Bundesbank. In this study small dynamic models for the monetary sector of the German economy are analyzed in...

This paper studies the smooth transition regression model where regressors are I(1) and errors are I(0). The regressors and errors are assumed to be dependent both serially and contemporaneously. Using the triangular array asymptotics, the nonlinear least squares estimator is shown to be...

A new kind of mixture autoregressive model with GARCH errors is introduced and applied to the U.S. short-term interest rate. According to the diagnostic tests developed in the paper and further informal checks the model is capable of capturing both of the typical characteristics of the...