As governments around the world contemplate slashing budget deficits, the 'expansionary fiscal consolidation hypothesis' is back in vogue. I argue that, as a statement about the short run, it should be taken with caution. Alesina and Perotti (1995) and Alesina and Ardagna (2010) (AAP) have...

This paper estimates the response of house prices to changes in short- and long-term interest rates in 47 advanced and emerging market economies. We use data that statistical authorities selected as their best house price series, covering almost half a century of quarterly observations for the...

The global long-term interest rate now matters much more for the monetary policy choices facing emerging market economies than a decade ago. The low or negative term premium in the yield curve in the advanced economies from mid-2010 has pushed international investors into EM local bond markets:...

International linkages between interest rates in different currencies are strong, and ultra-low rates have become a global phenomenon. This paper compares how interest rates in advanced economies and in emerging economies are conditioned by two global benchmarks - the Federal funds rate at the...

This study analyses oil price movements through the lens of an agnostic random forest model, which is based on 1,000 regression trees. It shows that this highly disciplined, yet flexible computational model reduces in-sample root mean square errors (RMSEs) by 65% relative to a standard linear...

Federal Reserve purchases of bonds in recent years have meant that a smaller proportion of long-dated government debt has had to be held by other investors (private sector and foreign official institutions). But the US Treasury has been lengthening the maturity of its issuance at the same time....