The appropriate design of monetary policy in integrated financial markets is one of the most challenging areas for central banks. One hot topic is whether the rise in liquidity in recent years has contributed to the formation of price bubbles in asset markets. If strong linkages exist, the...

This paper applies the Phillips and Sul (2007) method to test for convergence in stock returns to an extensive dataset including monthly stock price indices for five EU countries (Germany, France, the Netherlands, Ireland and the UK) as well as the US over the period 1973-2008. We carry out the...

This paper analyses monthly hours worked in the US over the sample period 1939m1 - 2011m10 using a cyclical long memory model; this is based on Gegenbauer processes and characterised by autocorrelations decaying to zero cyclically and at a hyperbolic rate along with a spectral density that is...

In this paper we examine the role of mortgage equity withdrawal in explaining the decline of the US saving rate, since when house prices rise and mortgage rates are low, homeowners have an incentive to withdraw housing equity and this may affect the saving rate. We estimate a Vector Error...

In this paper a mixed-frequency VAR à la Mariano & Murasawa (2004) with Markov regime switching in the parameters is estimated by Bayesian inference. Unlike earlier studies, that used the pseuo-EM algorithm of Dempster, Laird & Rubin (1977) to estimate the model, this paper describes how to...

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 nonlinearity of both series are found to vary considerably across...

This paper uses long-range dependence techniques to analyse two important features of the US Federal Funds effective rate, namely its persistence and cyclical behaviour. It examines annual, monthly, bi-weekly and weekly data, from 1954 until 2010. Two models are considered. One is based on an...

This paper adopts a flexible framework to assess both short- and long-run business cycle linkages between six Latin American (LA) countries and the four largest economies in the world (namely the US, the Euro area, Japan and China) over the period 1980:I-2011:IV. The result indicate that within...

In structural vector autoregressive analysis identifying the shocks of interest via heteroskedasticity has become a standard tool. Unfortunately, the approaches currently used for modelling heteroskedasticity all have drawbacks. For instance, assuming known dates for variance changes is often...