The paper analyses and compares the role that the tightening in liquidity conditions and the collapse in risk appetite played for the global transmission of the financial crisis. Dealing with identification and the large dimensionality of the empirical exercise with a Global VAR approach, the...

We study 30 vintages of FRB/US, the principal macro model used by the Federal Reserve Board staff for forecasting and policy analysis. To do this, we exploit archives of the model code, coefficients, baseline databases and stochastic shock sets stored after each FOMC meeting from the model’s...

Some channels through which increased inflation tends to reduce economic growth, and vice versa, are studied within a simple model incorporating money into an optimal growth framework with constant returns to capital. The model includes the potential impact of inflation on: (a) saving through...

A hallmark of modern labour economics is the close interplay between the development of theory, data sources and econometric testing. The evolution of the economic analysis of unemployment insurance (UI) provides a good illustration. The economics of UI has been a very active research area over...

This paper shows that the EMU has not affected historical characteristics of member countries’ business cycles and their cross-correlations. Member countries which had similar levels of GDP per-capita in the seventies have also experienced similar business cycles since then and no significant...

This paper shows how particle filtering allows us to undertake likelihood-based inference in dynamic macroeconomic models. The models can be nonlinear and/or non-normal. We describe how to use the output from the particle filter to estimate the structural parameters of the model, those...

A model of profits switches between four regimes with fixed probabilities; the rationally expected profits stream implies the stock market value. This efficient market model is not rejected by UK post-war time-series behaviour of either profits or the FTSE index.

We study the changing international transmission of US financial shocks over the period 1971-2009. Financial shocks are defined as unexpected changes of a financial conditions index (FCI), recently developed by Hatzius et al. (2010), for the US. We use a time-varying factor-augmented VAR to...

The paper analyses the transmission of liquidity shocks and risk shocks to global financial markets. Using a Global VAR methodology, the findings reveal fundamental differences in the transmission strength and pattern between the 2007-08 financial crisis and the 2010-11 sovereign debt crisis....

The dynamic behavior of the term structure of interest rates is difficult to replicate with models, and even models with a proven track record of empirical performance have underperformed since the early 2000s. On the other hand, survey expectations are accurate predictors of yields, but only...