In this paper, we study the effects of US target rate changes and related communications by members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors on spreads for emerging market sovereign credit default swaps (CDS). Using GARCH models, we find that during the pre-financial crisis sub-sample (April...

This paper empirically examines the theoretically ambivalent relationship between socially responsible investing (SRI) and stock performance. It extends the existing literature by considering both the US and the entire European stock markets as well as by using consistent world-wide corporate...

Exchange rates as well as relative price level and output movements are decomposed into components associated with nominal shocks as well as shocks to aggregate supply and aggregate demand. In contrast to previous analyses of such decompositions based on statistical vector autoregression (VAR)...

How is it possible that exchange rates move in the long run towards fundamentals, while professionals form consistently irrational exchange rate expectations? We look at this puzzle from a different perspective by analyzing investor sentiment in the US-dollar market. First, long-horizon...

The global hunger indices of 2008 and 2009 (Grebmer et al. 2008, 2009) point to persistently high levels of hunger and food insecurity and a worsening of the situation due to rising crop prices. At the same time, there is a lack of empirical knowledge on the demand- and supply-side determinants...

Credit risk is an important issue in many finance areas, such as the determination of cost of capital, the valuation of corporate bonds and pricing of credit derivatives. Credit risk has also been a cause and consequence of the current financial crisis. Thus, methods for measuring credit risk,...

This paper introduces inventories in an otherwise standard Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium Model (DSGE) of the business cycle. Firms accumulate inventories to facilitate sales, but face a cost of doing so in terms of costly storage of intermediate goods. The paper's main contribution is...

We examine both the degree and the structural stability of inflation persistence at different quantiles of the conditional inflation distribution. Previous research focused exclusively on persistence at the conditional mean of the inflation rate. Economic theory, however, provides various...

This paper studies regime dependence in macroeconomic dynamics in the U.S. using a threshold vector autoregressive model in which endogenous regime switches are triggered by the inflation rate. The model separates a high from a low inflation regime with both regimes being strongly persistent....

We study the correlation between pairs of bond and stock markets in Canada and the United States between January 1998 and December 2006 in the framework of Diagonal-BEKK models. Our research question is whether monetary policy action and communication by the Bank of Canada and the Federal...