In this paper, we assess whether and to what extent financial activity in the oil futures markets has contributed to destabilize oil prices in recent years. We define a destabilizing financial shock as a shift in oil prices that is not related to current and expected fundamentals, and thereby...

We implement a two-step approach to construct a financing conditions index (FCI) for the euro area and its four larger member states (Germany, France, Italy and Spain). The method, which follows Hatzius et al. (2010), is based on factor analysis and enables to summarise information on financing...

This paper studies the effects and the transmission mechanism of unexpected monetary policy shocks in an open economy setting within the context of a VAR frame- work. It considers an economy with two sectors, a tradable sector and a non-tradable sector. For a given country, economic sectors are...

We review, under a historical perspective, the development of the problem of nonfundamentalness of Moving Average (MA) representations of economic models. Nonfundamentalness typically arises when agents’ information space is larger than the econometrician’s one. Therefore it is impossible...

This paper compares impulse responses to monetary policy shocks in the euro area countries before the EMU and in the New Member States (NMS) from central-eastern Europe. We mitigate the small sample problem, which is especially acute for the NMS, by using a Bayesian estimation that combines...

JEL Classification: E32, E52, F31

By placing store-level price data into bivariate Structural VAR models of inflation and relative price asymmetry, this study evaluates the quantitative importance of idiosyncratic pricing shocks in short-run aggregate price change dynamics. Robustly to alternative definitions of the relative...

This paper analyses the international transmission of monetary shocks with a special focus on the effects of foreign money ("global liquidity") on the euro area. We estimate structural VAR models for the euro area and the global economy including a global liquidity aggregate. The impulse...

The paper provides a novel Bayesian methodological framework to estimate structural VAR (SVAR) models with recursive identification schemes that allows for the inclusion of over-identifying restrictions. The proposed framework enables the researcher to (i) elicit the prior on the non-zero...

Do oil shocks matter for exchange rates? This paper addresses this question based on data on real and nominal exchange rates as well as an exchange market pressure index for 44 advanced and emerging countries. We identify three structural shocks (oil supply, global demand, and oil specific...