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....

The authors develop and test a model to study the influence of inventory-on-hand and price-based reference points on the consumption rate of consumers. The model is motivated by recent theoretical and empirical research which suggests inventory pressure can cause consumers to increase...

In infinite horizon economies only local equivalence of beliefs is needed to ensure the existence of an Arrow-Debreu equilibrium. In fact, agents can even disagree completely in the long run in the sense that asymptotically, their beliefs are singular. -- Heterogeneous expectations ;...

In this paper we investigate four hypotheses which are inconsistent with expected utility theory, but may well be explained by prospect theory. It deals with framing, the non-linearity of subjective probabilities, the disposition effect, and the correspondence of different experimental risk...

We study behavior in experimental beauty contests with, first, boundary and interior equilibria, and, second, homogeneous and heterogenous types of players. We find quicker and better convergence to the game-theoretic equilibrium with interior equilibria and homogeneous players. -- beauty...

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...

This paper proposes a procedure for testing alternative specifications of the short term interest rate's dynamics which takes into account that according to some restrictions the interest rate is nonstationary, i.e. the traditional test statistic has a non-standard distribution. Moreover, we do...

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...