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...

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...

Asymmetric information models predict comovements among trade characteristics such as returns, bid-ask spread, and trade volume on one hand and the trading intensity on the other hand.In this paper we investigate empirically the two-sided causality between trade characteristics and trading...

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...

We analyze the time-dependence of exchange rate correlations using a new multivariate GARCH model. This model consists of two parts. First, we transform the exchange rate changes into their principal components and specify univariate GARCH models for all components. Second, we use the inverse of...