To investigate how economies, financial markets or institutions can deal with stress, we nowadays often analyze the effects of shocks conditional on a recession or a bear market. MSVAR models are ideally suited for such analyses because they combine gradual movement with sudden switches. In this...

This paper provides new evidence on the effects of government spending shocks and the fiscal transmission mechanism in the euro area for the period 1980-2008. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we investigate changes in the macroeconomic impact of government spending shocks using time-varying...

This paper describes a forecasting exercise of close-to-open returns on major global stock indices, based on price patterns from foreign markets that have become available overnight. As the close-to-open gap is a scalar response variable to a functional variable, it is natural to focus on...

Central banks resorted to asset purchase programs to replace conventional policy measures, which became ineffective after interest rates approached the zero lower bound. We investigate their effects on financial markets and focus on heterogeneous transmission using a Bayesian structural vector...

This paper features an analysis of the cointegration relationships among agricultural commodity, ethanol and Cushing crude oil spot and futures prices. The use of grains for the creation of bio-fuels has sparked fears that these demands are inflating food prices. We analyse approximately 10...