Germany and the United States are generally seen as the two competing systems of corporate governance. In search for a comparative welfare analysis of the financial systems, we are interested in (i) the aggregate value-added of corporate investments in the two countries and in (ii) the...

We reexamine the expectations theory of the term structure focusing on the question how monetary policy actions indicated by changes in the very short rate affect long-term interest rates. Our main point is that the expectations hypothesis implies that very long rates should only react to...

A small macroeconomicmodel is constructed starting from a German money demand relation for M3 based on quarterly, seasonally unadjusted data for the period from 1976 to 1996. In contrast to previous studies we build a vector error correction model for M3, GNP, an inflation rate and an interest...

The concept of integrated stochastic processes is widely used in empirical macroeconomics; and cointegration analysis is an important framework to analyze economic time series both in single equation and in system approaches. This framework is not only suited to study the relationships between...

It is argued that standard impulse response analysis based on vector autoregressive models has a number of shortcomings. Although the impulse responses are estimated quantities, measures for sampling variability such as confidence intervals are often not provided. If confidence intervals are...

Alternative modeling strategies for specifying subset VAR models are considered. It is shown that under certain conditions a testing procedure based on t-ratios is equivalent to sequentially eliminating lags that lead to the largest improvement in a prespecified model selection criterion. A...

The conditions under which European monetary policy is likely to be conducted are investigated by means of multi-variate time series modelling using aggregated data of all eleven European Monetary Union member states. A cointegration analysis identifies two stable long-run relationships within a...

In this article we model the log of the U.S. and the U.K. real oil prices in terms of fractionally integrated processes with a mean shift. We use different versions of the tests of Robinson (1994), which have standard null and local limit distributions. The results indicate that if we model the...

A money demand function for M2 is estimated for Italy for the period 1972-1998 within an error correction framework. This period has been characterized by major structural changes in the Italian financial system and by major changes in monetary policy. This study takes these changes into...

A new kind of mixture autoregressive model with GARCH errors is introduced and applied to the U.S. short-term interest rate. According to the diagnostic tests developed in the paper and further informal checks the model is capable of capturing both of the typical characteristics of the...