We document how firm-specific volatility in sales, earnings and employment growth evolved year by year in Japan. Our volatility measure also indicates the evolution of firm turnover. We find that patterns in firm-specific volatility have changed when macroeconomic circumstances have. Firm...

The equity premium in the UK appears to have risen significantly since the start of the financial crisis and the associated extended recession. This paper examines the relationship between the business cycle and equity market returns to see how robust this association is. Several classifications...

We examine the relation between US stock market returns and the US business cycle for the period 1960-2003 using a new methodology that allows us to estimate a time-varying equity premium. We identify two channels in the transmission mechanism. One is through the mean of stock returns via the...

The term premium is estimated from an empirically coherent open economy VAR model of the UK economy where the model specifically accounts for the mixed nature of the data and cointegration between some variables. Using this framework the estimated negative term premia for 1980-2007 is decomposed...

Two impediments to effective monetary policy operation include illiquidity in bond markets and the move towards the zero bound of interest rates. Either or both of these scenarios have been evident in many countries in the last decade, raising the suggestion that alternative means of enacting...

We evaluate the performance of an open economy DSGE-VAR model for New Zealand along both forecasting and policy dimensions. We show that forecasts froma DSGE-VAR and a "vanilla" DSGE model are competitive with, and in some dimensions superrior to, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand's official...

We estimate the underlying macroeconomic policy objectives of three of the earliest explicit inflation targeters - Australia, Canada and New Zealand - within the context of a small open economy DSGE model. We assume central banks set policy optimally, such that we can reverse engineer policy...

A puzzle from the Great Recession is an apparent mismatch between a fall in the persistence of European inflation rates, and the increased variability of expert forecasts of inflation. We explain this puzzle and show how country specific beliefs about inflation are still quite close to the...

We introduce financial market friction through search and matching in the loan market into a standard New Keynesian model. We reveal that the second order approximation of social welfare includes the terms related to credit, such as credit market tightness, the volume of credit, and the loan...

We investigate a new source of economic stickiness: namely, staggered loan interest rate contracts under monopolistic competition. The paper introduces this mechanism into a standard New Keynesian model. Simulations show that a response to a financial shock is greatly amplified by the staggered...