While virtually all modern models of exchange rate crises recognise that the decision to abandon an exchange rate peg depends on how harshly policy makers are willing to defend the regime, they virtually never model how the exchange rate is defended. In this paper we incorporate both the...

If there is exchange market pressure (EMP), monetary authorities can use the interest rate and official interventions to offset this depreciation tendency, or they can let the exchange rate change. We introduce a new approach to derive how these three variables should be combined to measure EMP....

This paper documents the existence of large structural breaks in the unconditional correlations among the British pound, Norwegian krone, Swedish krona, Swiss franc, and euro exchange rates (against the US dollar) during the period 1994-2003. Using the framework of dynamic conditional...

Most of the available monthly interest data series consist of monthly averages of daily observations. It is well- known that this averaging introduces spurious autocorrelation effects in the first differences of the series. It is exactly this differenced series we are interested in when...

The topic of convergence is at the heart of a wide-ranging debate in the growth literature. Empirical studies of convergence differ widely in their theoretical backgrounds, empirical specifications and in their treatment of cross-sectional heterogeneity. Despite these differences, a rate of...

The purpose of this paper is to build consistent, integrated datasets to investigate whether various disaggregated data can shed light on the possible sources of the statistical discrepancy. Our strategy is first to use disaggregated data to estimate consistent sets of input-output models that...

In this paper we replace the Gaussian errors in the standard Gaussian, linear state space model with stochastic volatility processes. This is called a GSSF-SV model. We show that conventional MCMC algorithms for this type of model are ineffective, but that this problem can be removed by...

This paper considers a simple Continuous Beliefs System (CBS) to investigate the effects on price dynamics of several behavioral assumptions: (i) herd behaviour; (ii) a-synchronous updating of beliefs; and (iii) heterogeneity in time horizons (memory) among agents. The recently introduced...

Exchange rate returns are fat-tailed distributed. We provide evidence that the apparent non-normality derives from the behavior of macroeconomic fundamentals. Economic and probabilistic arguments are offered for such a relationship. Empirical support is given by testing against normality and...

We argue that the failure to disentangle the evolution of the Canadian currency from the U.S. currency leads to potentially incorrect conclusions regarding the case of Dutch disease in Canada. We propose a new approach that is aimed at extracting both currency components and energy- and...