Prevailing explanations of the decline in real interest rates since the early 1980s are premised on the notion that real interest rates are driven by variations in desired saving and investment. But based on data stretching back to 1870 for 19 countries, our systematic analysis casts doubt on...

Do the prevailing unusually and persistently low real interest rates reflect a decline in the natural rate of interest as commonly thought? We argue that this is only part of the story. The critical role of financial factors in influencing medium-term economic fluctuations must also be taken...

Over 2010-2016, municipal debt in Germany crowded out private investment worth 1 percent of GDP. Forced to lend to municipalities by their statutes, local public banks compensated for declining municipal-debt yields by charging higher rates to firms in Germany’s locally segmented credit...

In response to the Great Financial Crisis, the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England have adopted unconventional monetary policy instruments. We investigate if one of these, purchases of long-term government debt, could be a valuable addition to conventional short-term interest rate policy...

How long is the long run in the relationship between money growth and inflation? How important are high inflation episodes for the unit slope finding in the quantity theory of money? To answer these questions we study the relationship between excess money growth and inflation over time and...

This paper revisits the case for exible vs. fixed exchange rate regime in a two-country model with firm heterogeneity and nominal wage rigidity under incomplete financial markets. Dampening nominal exchange rate fluctuations simultaneously stabilizes the firm turnover in the export market. When...

This paper studies financial market disturbances as sources of investment fluctuations in Finland during 1995–2008. We construct a DSGE model of the Finnish economy that incorporates two domestic financial market shocks and financial frictions in the form of a BGG financial accelerator. We...

This paper introduces a methodology for identifying oil supply shocks in a restricted VAR system for a small open economy. Financial market information is used to construct an identification scheme that forces the response of the restricted VAR model to an oil shock to be the same as that...

Filtering intraday seasonality in volatility is crucial for using high frequency data in econometric analysis. This paper studies the effects of filtering on statistical inference concerning the impact of news on exchange rate volatility. The properties of different methods are studied using a...

A DSGE model with a Taylor rule is augmented with an evolutionary switching between technical and fundamental analyses in currency trade, where the fractions of these trading tools are determined within the model. Then, a shock hits the economy. As a result, chaotic dynamics and long swings may...