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 model EU countries' bank ratings using financial variables and allowing for intercept and slope heterogeneity. Our aim is to assess whether "old" and "new" EU countries are rated differently and to determine whether "new" ones are assigned lower ratings, ceteris paribus, than "old" ones. We...

This paper examines the Taylor rule in five emerging economies, namely Indonesia, Israel, South Korea, Thailand, and Turkey. In particular, it investigates whether monetary policy in these countries can be more accurately described by (i) an augmented rule including the exchange rate, as well as...

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 1980.s and slightly...