In this paper, the empirical relevance of the credit channel for the explanation of monetary policy transmission in Germany during the period of monetary targeting from 1975 to 1998 is analyzed. While existing studies of the credit channel rely mostly on the analysis of monetary policy effects...

In 2001, the Fed has lowered interest rates in a series of cuts, starting from 6.5 % at the end of 2000 to 2.0 % by early November. This paper asks, whether the Federal Reserve Bank has been surprising the markets, taking as given the conventional view about the effect of monetary policy shocks....

In this paper, the structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model is used to analyze short-run and contemporaneous relationships between monetary aggregates and other macroeconomic variables. This requires imposing restrictions on the correlation structure of the VAR residuals. Different...

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...

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...

Testing the cointegrating rank of a vector autoregressive process with an intercept is considered. In addition to the likelihood ratio (LR) tests developed by Johansen and Juselius and others we also consider an alternative class of tests which is based on estimating the trend parameters of the...

Tests for the cointegrating rank of a vector autoregressive process are considered which allow for possible exogenous shifts in the mean of the data generation process. The break points are assumed to be known a priori. It is proposed to estimate and remove the deterministic terms such as mean,...

Likelihood ratio (LR) tests for the cointegrating rank of a vector autoregressive (VAR) process have been developed under different assumptions regarding deterministic terms. For instance, nonzero mean terms and linear trends have been accounted for in some of the tests. In this paper we provide...