This paper investigates whether the degree and the nature of economic and monetary policy interdependence between the United States and the euro area have changed with the advent of EMU. Using real-time data, it addresses this issue from the perspective of financial markets by analysing the...

This paper provides an assessment of central bank transparency for the efficiency of monetary policy implementation, using the introduction of balance-of-risks assessments by the Federal Reserve as a testing device. We find that markets anticipated monetary policy decisions equally well under...

Mortgages constitute the largest part of household debt. An essential choice when taking out a mortgage is between fixed-interest-rate mortgages (FRMs) and adjustable-interest-rate mortgages (ARMs). However, so far, no comprehensive cross-country study has analyzed what determines household...

Mortgages constitute the largest part of household debt. An essential choice when taking out a mortgage is between fixed-interest-rate mortgages (FRMs) and adjustable-interest-rate mortgages (ARMs). However, so far, no comprehensive cross-country study has analyzed what determines household...

Against the background of the current debate about fiscal sustainability in several advanced economies, this paper estimates the determinants of sovereign bond spreads of the G7 countries, using high-frequency proxies for market expectations about macroeconomic fundamentals. It allows for...

How do financial markets price new information? This paper analyzes price setting at the intersection of private and public information, by testing whether and how the reaction of financial markets to public signals depends on the relative importance of private information in agents’...

How do financial markets incorporate news? This paper argues that one piece of news not only has direct effects on asset prices and market volatility, but it can also alter the relative importance of other news. Studying the reaction of UK short-term interest rates to the Bank of England’s...

This paper consider the GLS detrending procedure advanced by Elliott et al. (1996) for unit root tests against alternative hypotheses where the time series data under investigation follow either globally stationary SETAR or STAR processes with deterministic components being present. It is found...

This paper presents empirical evidence on the behaviour of interbank lending in Germany after a monetary policy impulse. Our VAR analysis shows that following a monetary contraction, the banking system as a whole attracts additional funds from foreign banks. Whereas small cooperative and savings...

This paper offers a comprehensive comparison of the structure of banking and financial markets in the euro area. Based on this, several hypotheses about the role of banks in monetary policy transmission are developed. Many of the predictions that have been proposed for the U.S. are deemed...