This paper investigates whether oil prices have a reliable and stable out-of-sample relationship with the Canadian/U.S dollar nominal exchange rate. Despite state-of-the-art methodologies, we find little systematic relation between oil prices and the exchange rate at the monthly and quarterly...

This paper provides evidence of heterogeneous treatment effects on trade from switching among three types of de-facto exchange rate regimes: freely floating, currency bands, and pegs or currency unions. A cottage literature at the interface of macroeconomics and international economics focuses...

This paper proposes new methodologies for evaluating out-of-sample forecasting performance that are robust to the choice of the estimation window size. The methodologies involve evaluating the predictive ability of forecasting models over a wide range of window sizes. We show that the tests...

We propose a new method to model hedge fund risk exposures using relatively high frequency conditioning variables. In a large sample of funds, we find substantial evidence that hedge fund risk exposures vary across and within months, and that capturing within-month variation is more important...

The New Keynesian Phillips Curve is at the centre of two raging empirical debates. First, how can purely forward looking pricing account for the observed persistence in aggregate inflation. Second, price-setting responds to movements in marginal costs, which should therefore be the driving force...

Forecast combinations have frequently been found in empirical studies to produce better forecasts on average than methods based on the ex-ante best individual forecasting model. Moreover, simple combinations that ignore correlations between forecast errors often dominate more refined combination...

Many central banks have abandoned monetary targeting because the link between money growth and inflation seemed to disappear in the 1980s. Using spectral regression techniques, we show that for the euro area, Japan, the UK and the US there is a unit relationship between money growth and...

A number of European countries, among which the UK and Spain, have opened up their Directory Enquiry Services (DQs) market to competition. In Spain, both local and foreign firms challenged the incumbent as of April 2003. The latter abused its dominant position by providing an inferior quality...

It is difficult to obtain reliable measures of evolving openness to trade, despite its relevance to models of growth, inflation and exchange rates. Our innovative technique measures trade openness encompassing both observable trade policy (tariffs and surcharges) and unobservable trade policy...

Announced in the autumn of 1998, the monetary policy strategy of the European Central Bank (ECB) quickly became controversial, arguably because the ECB provided neither an explicit representation of the inflation process nor an explanation for why it necessitated the adoption of a two-pillar...