We analyze the impact of price stability-oriented monetary strategies (inflation targeting—IT—and constraining exchange rate arrangements) on inflation persistence using a time-varying coefficients framework in a panel of 68 countries (1993–2013). We show that explicit IT has a stronger...

This paper investigates the asymptotic local power of the the averaged t-test of Im, Pesaran and Shin (2003, IPS hereafter) in the presence of both initial explosive conditions and incidental trends. By utilizing the least squares detrending methods, it is found that the initial condition plays...

The ‘saving for a rainy day’ hypothesis implies that households’ saving decisions reflect that they can (rationally) predict future income declines. The empirical relevance of this hypothesis plays a key role in discussions of fiscal policy multipliers and it holds under the null that the...

We tackle the nowcasting problem at the regional level using a large set of indicators (regional, national and international) for the years 1998 to 2013. We explicitly use the ragged-edge data structure and consider the different information sets faced by a regional forecaster within each...

This study examines the relationship between healthcare expenditure and disposable income in the 50 US states over the period 1966-2009 using fractional integration and cointegration techniques. The degree of integration and non-linearity of both series are found to vary considerably across...

We argue that, under certain conditions, firms consider exports as a substitute for domestic demand. Our econometric model for six euro area countries suggests domestic demand and capacity constraints as additional variables for export equations. We apply the exponential and logistic variant of...

This paper investigates whether exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) into import prices is a nonlinear phenomenon for five heavily indebted Euro area countries, namely the so-called GIIPS group (Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain). Using logistic smooth transition models, we explore the...

This article presents a systematic and extensive empirical study on the presence of Markov switching dynamics in three dollar-based exchange rates. A Monte Carlo approach is adopted to circumvent the statistical inference problem inherent to the test of regime-switching behavior. Two data...

We analyze the role of forward-looking indicators, like the IFO business climate indicator and asset prices, in German monetary transmission. We show that the use of both the IFO indicator and asset prices improves the performance and interpretation of a Vector AutoRegression (VAR) model of...

This paper studies the information content of some Ifo indicators. In particular, we investigate whether two Ifo indicators, one on the current business situation, the other on current production development, provide information on revisions of German industrial production. A new feature of our...