We derive counterfactual national interest rate paths for the 17 Euro Area countries for the period 1999 to 2012 to approximate the interest rates countries would have implemented had they still been able to conduct independent monetary policy. We find that prior to the financial crisis the...

While the yield spread has long been recognized as a good predictor of recessions, it seems to have been largely overlooked by professional forecasters. We examine this puzzle, established by Rudebusch and Williams (2009), in a data-rich environment including not just the yield spread but many...

This article contributes to the literature on stock market integration by developing and estimating a capital asset pricing model with segmentation effects in order to assess stock market segmentation and its effects on risk premia at the regional level. We show that the estimated degrees of...

We contribute to the finance literature in two main ways. First, we present a theoretical capital asset pricing model (CAPM) to price assets in different market structures. Second, we use our model to analyze whether when markets are partially segmented using the local or the global CAPM yields...

Long-run restrictions have been used extensively for identifying structural shocks in vector autoregressive (VAR) analysis. Such restrictions are typically just-identifying but can be checked by utilizing changes in volatility. This paper reviews and contrasts the volatility models that have...

This paper analyses the effects of newspaper coverage of macro news on stock returns in eight countries belonging to the euro area (Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain) using daily data for the period 1994-2013. The econometric analysis is based on the estimation...

This paper investigates the time-varying impact of oil price uncertainty on stock prices in China using weekly data on ten sectoral indices over the period January 1997-Febraury 2014. The estimation of a bivariate VAR-GARCH-in-mean model suggests that oil price volatility affects stock returns...

This paper uses long-range dependence techniques to analyse two important features of the US Federal Funds effective rate, namely its persistence and cyclical behaviour. It examines annual, monthly, bi-weekly and weekly data, from 1954 until 2010. Two models are considered. One is based on an...

In this paper we examine the role of mortgage equity withdrawal in explaining the decline of the US saving rate, since when house prices rise and mortgage rates are low, homeowners have an incentive to withdraw housing equity and this may affect the saving rate. We estimate a Vector Error...

In this paper, we assess the accuracy of macroeconomic forecasts at the regional level using a unique data set at quarterly frequency. We forecast gross domestic product (GDP) for two German states (Free State of Saxony and Baden-Württemberg) and Eastern Germany. We overcome the problem of a...