The strong consumption growth in a period of falling stock market and a moderate recession in the U.S. has sparked off a debate about the role of housing wealth as one of the determinants of consumption. The literature is divided over the issue whether the effect of change in the financial...

Cyclical components in economic time series are analysed in a Bayesian framework, thereby allowing prior notions about periodicity to be used. The method is based on a general class of unobserved component models that allow relatively smooth cycles to be extracted. Posterior densities of...

The aim of the present paper is to analyze the pass-through from exchange rate to inflation in Brazil from 1980 to 2002. Initially, we developed a model of a profit-maximizing firm based on the pricing-to-market approach presented by FEENSTRA and KENDAL (1997). In order to adapt the model to the...

We examine the impact of public information in an economy where agents also have diverse private information. Our work builds on seminal contributions by Townsend (1983) and Phelps (1983), and more recently Woodford (2002), which emphasized the importance of higher-order beliefs – that is,...

Extending recent theoretical contributions on sources of inflation inertia, we argue that monetary uncertainty accounts for sluggish expectations adjustment to nominal disturbances. Estimating a model in which rational individuals learn over time about shifts in U.S. monetary policy and the...

In this paper we incorporate the term structure of interest rates in a standard inflation forecast targeting framework. Learning about the transmission process of monetary policy is introduced by having heterogeneous agents - i.e. the central bank and private agents - who have different...

Many securities are, to a certain extent, subject to credit risk in one way or another. Both the financial institutions and regulators are keen to have their credit risk exposures well managed. In order to fulfill their needs, the market for credit derivatives has become one of the fast growing...

It is known that stock returns are affected by monetary policy. This paper theoretically and empirically investigates whether asymmetric information between the Federal Reserve and the public causes the relation between stock returns and monetary policy actions. The paper concludes that...

A general Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo methodology is utilized for conducting an analysis of the intensity process of stock market data. The sampling scheme employed is a hybrid of the Gibbs and Metropolis Hastings algorithms. Both duration and count data time series approaches are utilized...