We investigate the relationship between inflation and price variation using highly disaggregated, weekly price data for consumption goods recorded in Germany during 1995, a low inflation period. We find a significant positive correlation between the rates of price change and price dispersion,...

The unbiasedness hypothesis -- the joint hypothesis of uncovered interest parity (UIP) and rational expectations -- has been almost universally rejected in studies of exchange rate movements. In contrast to previous studies, which have used short-horizon data, we test this hypothesis using...

The small sample properties of two types of Chow tests are investigated in the context of multiple time series models. It is found that the tests may have substantially distorted size if the sample size is not large relative to the number of parameters in the model under study. In particular the...

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...

Because the parameters of vector autoregressive processes are often difficult to interpret directly, econometricians use quantities derived from the parameters to disentangle the relationships between the variables. Bootstrap methods are often used for inference on the derived quantities....

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...

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...