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...

Although stock splits seem to be a purely cosmetic event, there exists ample empirical evidence from the United States that stock splits are associated with abnormal returns on both the announcement and the execution day, and additionally with an increase in variance following the ex-day. This...

We analyse in this article the monthly structure of the Brazilian inflation rate by means of fractionally integrated techniques. This series is characterized by strong government interventions to bring inflation to a low level. We use a testing procedure due to Robinson (1994) which allow us to...

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...

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,...