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 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 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...

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...

We analyze daily changes of two log foreign exchange (FX) rates involving the Deutsche Mark (DEM) for the period 1975 - 1998, namely FX-rates measured against the US dollar (USD) and the Japanese yen (JPY). Ta account for volatility e1ustering we fit a GARCH(l,l)-model with leptokurtic...

We investigate the small sample properties of two types of weak exogeneity tests in cointegrated VAR models that are frequently used in applied work. The first one is the standard Likelihood Ratio (LR) test in the Johansen framework. The second test is based on mapping the cointegrated VAR model...