Long-horizon interest rates in the major international bond markets fell sharply during 2004 and 2005, at the same time as US policy rates were rising; a phenomenon famously described as a 'conundrum' by Alan Greenspan the Federal Reserve Chairman. But it was arguably the decline in...

Most tests of preferred habitat theory are indirect; they infer the existence of preferred habitat behaviour in financial markets by examining the behaviour of asset prices. We instead identify preferred habitat behaviour directly from whether investors show a preference towards a particular...

This paper analyses the nominal and real interest rate term structures in the United Kingdom over the fifteen-year period that the UK monetary authorities have pursued an explicit inflation target, using a four-factor essentially affine term structure model. The model imposes no-arbitrage...

One way quantitative easing (QE) purchases of government bonds by central banks may affect the yield curve is by creating scarcity in the purchased securities, leading to an increase in their prices or equivalently a reduction in their yields. We analyse and compare the importance of this...

In this paper we assess the macroeconomic effects of two of the flagship unconventional monetary policies used by the Bank of England during the later stages of the global economic crisis: additional quantitative easing (QE) and the introduction of the Funding for Lending Scheme (FLS). We argue...

We examine the impact of the first phase of the Bank of England's quantitative easing (QE) programme during March 2009 to January 2010 on the UK government bond (gilt) market, using high-frequency disaggregated data on individual gilts. We find that: QE announcements took varying amounts of time...

The deviance information criterion (DIC) has been widely used for Bayesian model comparison. However, recent studies have cautioned against the use of the DIC for comparing latent variable models. In particular, the DIC calculated using the conditional likelihood (obtained by conditioning on the...

The empirical support for a DSGE type of real business cycle model with two technology shocks is evaluated using a Bayesian model averaging procedure that makes use of a finite mixture of many models within the class of vector autoregressive (VAR) processes. The linear VAR model is extended to...

The empirical support for a DSGE type of real business cycle model with two technology shocks is evaluated using a Bayesian model averaging procedure that makes use of a finite mixture of many models within the class of vector autoregressive (VAR) processes. The linear VAR model is extended to...

The modified harmonic mean is widely used for estimating the marginal likelihood. We investigate the empirical performance of two versions of this estimator: one based on the observed-data likelihood and the other on the complete-data likelihood. Through an empirical example using US and UK...