We investigate the role of crude oil spot and futures prices in the process of price discovery by using a cost-of-carry model with an endogenous convenience yield and daily data over the period from January 1990 to December 2008. We provide evidence that futures markets play a more important...

We disentangle the effects of monetary policy announcements on real economic variables into an interest rate shock component and a central bank information shock component. We identify both components using changes in interest rate futures and in exchange rates around monetary policy...

In this paper, the extent of the shadow economy in OECD countries is investigated. The estimates of the size of the shadow economy are obtained using the panel-data techniques applied to the data on 38 OECD member states over the period 1991-2007. Our estimates tend to be somewhat lower than the...

We use noncausal autoregressions to examine the persistence properties of quarterly U.S. consumer price inflation from 1970:1-2012:2. These nonlinear models capture the autocorrelation structure of the inflation series as accurately as their conventional causal counterparts, but they allow for...

We propose a noncausal autoregressive model with time-varying parameters, and apply it to U.S. postwar inflation. The model fits the data well, and the results suggest that inflation persistence follows from future expectations. Persistence has declined in the early 1980s and slightly increased...

The GARCH(1,1) model and its extensions have become a standard econometric tool for modeling volatility dynamics of financial returns and portfolio risk. In this paper, we propose an adjustment of GARCH implied conditional value-at-risk and expected shortfall forecasts that exploits the...

This paper deals with the impact of the $/€ exchange rate on German exports in the period from 1995Q1 to 2008Q4. Our main aim is to identify "pain thresholds" for German exporters. We rely on a non-linear model according to which suddenly strong spurts of exports occur when changes of the EXR...

This paper estimates ordered logit and probit regression models for bank ratings which also include a country index to capture country-specific variation. The empirical findings provide support to the hypothesis that the individual international bank ratings assigned by Fitch Ratings are...

We examine real business cycle convergence for 41 euro area regions and 48 US states. Results obtained by a panel model with spatial correlation indicate that the relevance of common business cycle factors is rather stable over the past two decades in the euro area and the US. Ongoing business...

This paper studies the productivity impact of heterogeneous capital inputs of selected EU-15 member countries and of the U.S. at the macroeconomic level. The stochastic possibility frontiers approach of Battese and Coelli (1992) applied here is used to identify neutralities or nonneutralities...