This paper provides a general strategy for analyzing monetary policy in real time which accounts for data uncertainty without explicitly modelling the revision process. The strategy makes use of all the data available from a real-time data matrix and averages model estimates across all data...

Labour market policies settled at national level imply a “one-size-fits-all” labour market strategy. This strategy might not sufficiently take into account region-specific economic structures. We employ a panel factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR) to evaluate whether active labour...

This paper evaluates the effects of the 2012 announcements of the ECB’s Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) programme. Using high frequency data, we find that the OMT announcements decreased the Italian and Spanish two years government bond yields by about two percentage points, while leaving...

We analyze the reaction of the U.S. Treasury bond market to innovations in macroe-economic fundamentals. We identify these innovations based on macroeconomic news, which are defined as differences between the actual releases and market expectations. We find that that macroeconomic news explain...

This paper analyzes the welfare effects of funding regulation for defined benefit pension plans subject to pension benefit default risk in an incomplete financial markets OLG-setting with aggregate uncertainty and idiosyncratic pension default risk. The financial market incompleteness arises...

In finance, getting an accurate estimation of the term structure of interest rates is essential because this information is often used as input by other pricing financial models. In this paper, we point out the importance of selecting a suitable estimation of the term structure of interest...

The paper reviews the literature on these tax incentives, with special focus on long-term saving, housing, and household liabilities. The paper addresses several areas of policy intervention: (1) the interest rate effect on personal saving; (2) the effect of tax incentives on long-term mandatory...

In an overlapping generations economy households (lenders) fund risky investment projects of firms (borrowers) by drawing up loan contracts on the basis of asymmetric information. An optimal contract entails either the issue of only debt or the issue of both debt and equity according to whether...

We consider a firm moving towards a stochastic final destination, to be chosen from a discrete set after a decision period. The decision period itself may be deterministic or stochastic. We assume the firm can move at variable innovation (R&D) speed associated with a monotone nondecreasing...

In the last decade, the increased competition between European stock exchanges has reduced the cost of trading and increased the variety of trading mechanisms. The London Stock Exchange, which initiated the competition in 1986 by setting up the SEAQ-I market, attracted considerable trading...