This note looks at US$ and DM/Euro denominated government bond spreads relative to US and German benchmark bonds before and after the start of the current financial crisis. The study finds, first, that bond yield spreads before and during the crisis can largely be explained on the basis of...

This paper focuses on risk premiums paid by central governments in Europe and sub-national governments in Germany, Spain, and Canada. With regard to the European governments, we are interested in how these premiums were affected by the introduction of the euro. Using data for bond yield spreads...

We study credible information transmission by a benevolent Central Bank. We consider two possibilities: direct revelation through an announcement, versus indirect information transmission through monetary policy. These two ways of transmitting information have very different consequences. Since...

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’...

Despite substantial differences in monetary policy and communication strategies, many central banks share the practice of purdah, a self-imposed guideline of abstaining from communication around policy meetings or other important events. This practice is remarkable, as it seems to contradict the...

This paper develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with nominal rigidities, capital accumulation and finite lifetimes. The framework exhibits intergenerational wealth effects and is intended to investigate the macroeconomic implications of fiscal policy, which is specified by...

The monetary integration of the acceding countries will proceed in several distinct steps, starting with membership in the European Union (EU), followed by participation in the so-called Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) II and ultimately entry into the euro area. This paper addresses the question...

Using vector autoregressions on U.S. time series for 1957-1979 and 1983-2004, we find government spending shocks to have stronger effects on output, consumption, and wages in the earlier sample. We try to account for this observation within a DSGE model featuring price rigidities and limited...

We introduce a specification of habit formation featuring non-separability between consumption and leisure into an otherwise standard New Keynesian model. The model can be estimated with standard Bayesian techniques and the bond pricing implications are evaluated using higher-order...

I show that the zero nominal interest rate bound may render it desirable for society to appoint a fiscally activist policy-maker who cares less about the stabilisation of government spending relative to inflation and output gap stabilisation than the private sector does. I work with a simple New...