The purpose of this paper is to reexamine empirically the relationship between long-term interest rates in well integrated ?nancial markets. The analysis focuses on long-term interest rates in the US and Germany and has been carried out within the framework of a ?ve dimensional VAR for the...

We use a dynamic factor model and a detailed panel data set for six Norwegian bank groups to analyze i) how funding costs affect retail loan rates and ii) how retail rate differences between banks affect market shares. The data set consist of quarterly data for 2002Q1-2011Q3 and include...

If central banks value the ex-post accuracy of their forecasts, previously announced interest rate paths might affect the current policy rate. We explore whether this "forecast adherence" has influenced the monetary policies of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and the Norges Bank, the two central...

This paper investigates the effectiveness of the Federal Reserve's Term Auction Facility (TAF) in alleviating the liquidity shortage in USD and reducing the spread between the 3-month Libor rate and the expected policy rate. I construct a proxy for the 3-month liquidity risk premium based on...

In this paper we study the transmission for capital depreciation shocks. The existing literature in the Real Business Cycle tradition has concluded that these shocks are irrelevant for business cycle fluctuations. We show that these shocks are potentially important drivers of aggregate...

Recent studies find that shocks to the marginal efficiency of investment are a main driver of business cycles. Yet, they struggle to explain why consumption co-moves with real variables such as investment and output, which is a typical feature of an empirically recognizable business cycle. In...

This paper bridges the new open economy factor augmented VAR (FAVAR) studies with the recent findings in the business cycle synchronization literature emphasizing the importance of regional factors. That is, we estimate and identify a three block FAVAR model with separate world, regional and...

This paper investigates how concentrated ownership of capital influences the pricing of risky assets in a production economy. The model is designed to approximate the skewed distribution of wealth and income in U.S. data. I show that concentrated ownership significantly magnifies the equity risk...

On the basis of data from the Historical Monetary Statistics-project by Norges Bank, the present paper serves a threefold purpose. In the first place it gives an overview of financial crisis in Norway from her independence from Denmark in 1814 till present times. Secondly, historical business...

We estimate demand, supply, monetary, investment and financial shocks in a VAR identified with a minimum set of sign restrictions on US data. We find that financial shocks are major drivers of fluctuations in output, stock prices and investment but have a limited effect on inflation. In a second...