The U.S. economy appears to have experienced a pronounced shift toward higher productivity over the last five years or so. We wish to understand the implications of such shifts for the structure of optimal monetary policy rules in simple dynamic economies. Accordingly, we begin with a standard...

Abstract: Shocks to bank lending, risk-taking and securitization activities that are orthogonal to real economy and monetary policy innovations account for more than 30 percent of U.S. output variation. The dynamic effects, however, depend on the type of shock. Expansionary securitization shocks...

This paper provides locally optimal pseudo-Gaussian and rank-based tests for<br/>the cointegration rank in linear cointegrated error-correction models with i.i.d.<br/>elliptical innovations. The proposed tests are asymptotically distribution-free,<br/>hence their validity does not depend on the actual...

This paper offers an alternative technique to derive the limiting distribution of residual-based statistics or, more general, the limiting distribution of statistics with estimated nuisance parameters.This technique allows us to unify many known results on two-stage estimators and tests and we...

We investigate the effects of fiscal policy surprises for US data, using vector autoregressions.We overcome the difficulties that changes in fiscal policy may manifest themselves in variables other than fiscal variables first and that fiscal variables may respond 'automatically' to business...

This paper discusses the joint estimation of the long run equilibrium coe cients and the parameters governing the short run dynamics of a fully parametric cointegrated system formulated in continuous time.The model allows the stationary disturbances to be generated by a stochastic di erential...

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...

This paper is concerned with issues of model specification, identification, and estimation in exchange rate models with unobservable fundamentals.We show that the model estimated by Gardeazabal, Reg´ulez and V´azquez (International Economic Review, 1997) is not identified and demonstrate how...

Abstract: This paper introduces rank-based tests for the cointegrating rank in an Error Correction Model with i.i.d. elliptical innovations. The tests are asymptotically distribution-free, and their validity does not depend on the actual distribution of the innovations. This result holds despite...