This paper provides an overview of the analysis of the term structure of interest rates with a special emphasis on recent developments at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance. The topic is important to investors and also to policymakers, who wish to extract macroeconomic expectations...

This paper shows that monetary policy should be delegated to a central bank that cross-checks optimal policy with information from the Taylor rule. Attaching some weight to deviations of the interest rate from the interest rate prescribed by the Taylor rule is beneficial if the central bank aims...

A long-standing area of research and policy interest has been the construction of a measure of monetary policy stance. One measure that has been proposed—as an alternative to indices that employ monetary aggregates or exchange rates—is the spread between the actual real interest rate and its...

In this paper, we explore the interest rate setting behavior of newly appointed central bank governors. We use the Kuttner and Posen (2010) sample, which covers 15 OECD countries, and estimate an augmented Taylor (1993) rule for the period 1974–2008. We find, first, that newly appointed...

We highlight how detrending within Structural Vector Autoregressions (SVAR) is directly linked to the shock identification. Consequences of trend misspecification are investigated using a prototypical Real Business Cycle model as the Data Generating Process. Decomposing the different sources of...

There has been a lot of interest recently in developing small-scale rule-based empirical macro models for the analysis of monetary policy. These models, based on the conventional view that inflation stabilization should be a concern of monetary policy only, have typically neglected the role of...

Since the oil crises of the 1970s there has been strong interest in the question of how oil production shortfalls caused by wars and other exogenous political events in OPEC countries affect oil prices, US real GDP growth and US CPI inflation. This study focuses on the modern OPEC period since...

We investigate the sources of macroeconomic (output and inflation) variability in selected European countries within and outside the European Monetary Union: Germany, Italy, Austria, the UK and Poland. Using quarterly data from 1985:1 to 2005:4, we estimate a Global Vector Autoregressive (GVAR)...

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...

A puzzle from the Great Recession is an apparent mismatch between a fall in the persistence of European inflation rates, and the increased variability of expert forecasts of inflation. We explain this puzzle and show how country specific beliefs about inflation are still quite close to the...