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 macroeconomic model is constructed to study the transmission of the monetary policy conducted by the Deutsche Bundesbank (DBB) since the middle of the 1970s. For this purpose quarterly, seasonally unadjusted data for the period from 1975 to 1998 are used, that is, the period until the...

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...

Recent investigations of the transmission mechanism of German monetary policy arrive at quite different conclusions regarding its stability during the period of monetary targeting by the Bundesbank. In this study small dynamic models for the monetary sector of the German economy are analyzed in...

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...

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 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...

The unbiased expectations hypothesis states that forward rates are unbiased estimates for future short rates. Cox, Ingersoll and Ross [1] conjectured that this hypothesis should be inconsistent with the absence of arbitrage possibilities. Using the framework of Heath, Jarrow and Morton [4] we...