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...

This paper examines the relationship between unemployment, real oil price and real interest rates in Canada. Instead of following the classical approach based on I(0) stationarity or I(1) cointegrating relationships, we use fractional integration/cointegration techniques which allow for the...

This article is concerned with the dynamic behaviour of UK unemployment. However, instead of using traditional approaches based on I(0) stationary or I(1) (integrated and/or cointegrated) models, we use the fractional integration framework. In doing so, we allow for a more careful study of the...

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...

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...