In an attempt to move beyond the purchasing power parity hypothesis, this paper studies two issues. First, the causes of movements of real exchange rates are investigated. In contrast to the typical result, supply shocks are found to dominate the long-run variance decompositions for all...

This paper studies how wages and employment are affected by unemployment insurance when there is endogenous labor mobility. In a simple model with symmetric sectors, it is shown that introducing labor mobility reduces the wage level, and thereby also unemployment. It is also shown that an...

This paper proposes the use of the two-factor term-structure model of Longstaff and Schwartz (1992a,LS) to estimate the risk-neutral density (RND) of the futur short-term interest rate. THe resulting RND can be interpreted as the market´s estimate of the density of the future short-term...

Vector autoregressions have steadily gained in popularity since their introduction in econometrics 25 years ago. A drawback of the otherwise fairly well developed methodology is the inability to incorporate prior beliefs regarding the system's steady state in a satisfactory way. Such prior...

Volatility implied in option prices reflects the market participant's beliefs about future volatility and incorporates information that is not historical. Implied volatility is therefore widely believed to perform better as an indicator of future volatility than other forecasts based on...

This paper aims to evaluate if frictions in credit markets are important for business cycles in the U.S. and the Euro area. For this purpose, I modify the DSGE financial accelerator model developed by Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999) by adding frictions such as price indexation to past...

We model a regression density nonparametrically so that at each value of the covariates the density is a mixture of normals with the means, variances and mixture probabilities of the com- ponents changing smoothly as a function of the covariates. The model extends existing models in two...

In theory, prices of current-month federal funds futures contracts should reflect market expectations of near-term movements in the Federal Reserve's target level for the federal funds rate. However, empirical results show that such measures of market expectations are too noisy to predict...

We study the specific corporate governance problems of central banks in their complex role of inflation guardians, bankers’ banks, financial industry regulators/supervisors and, in some cases, competition authorities and deposit insurance agencies. We review the current institutional...

I revisit the potential costs and benefits for Sweden of joining the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) of the European Union. I first show that the Swedish business cycle since the mid-1990s has been closely correlated with the Euro area economies, suggesting that common shocks have been an...