We reexamine the expectations theory of the term structure focusing on the question how monetary policy actions indicated by changes in the very short rate affect long-term interest rates. Our main point is that the expectations hypothesis implies that very long rates should only react to...

It is argued that standard impulse response analysis based on vector autoregressive models has a number of shortcomings. Although the impulse responses are estimated quantities, measures for sampling variability such as confidence intervals are often not provided. If confidence intervals are...

The analysis of diffusion processes in financial models is crucially dependent on the form of the drift and diffusion coefficient functions. A methodology is proposed for estimating and testing coefficient functions for ergodic diffusions that are not directly observable. It is based on...