This paper examines whether government ideology has influenced monetary policy in OECD countries. We use quarterly data in the 1980.1-2005.4 period and exclude EMU countries. Our Taylor-rule specification focuses on the interactions of a new time-variant index of central bank independence with...

After the dramatic rescue package for the euro area, the governing council of the European Central Bank decided to purchase European government bonds - to ensure an "orderly monetary policy transmission mechanism". Many observers argued that, by bond purchases, national fiscal policies could...

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 investigates the usefulness of the money demand relationship in times of unconventional monetary policies by cointegration methods. In contrast to the bulk of the literature, evidence in favour of a stable long run money demand function is presented both for the US and the euro area....

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...

We assess the differences that emerge in Taylor rule estimations for the ECB when using ex-post data instead of real time forecasts and vice versa. We argue that previous comparative studies in this field mixed up two separate effects. First, the differences resulting from the use of ex-post and...

The main objective of this study is to highlight the importance of political instability, defined as frequent changes in and of government, in undermining the Russian exchange rate based stabilization program of the 1990s. The empirical evidence supports the significance of political instability...

This paper analyzes the response of the European stock markets to the monetary policy shocks by the European Central Bank using the heteroskedasticity based approach of Rigobon (2003). We find that monetary policy tightening has a heterogeneous impact on the Euro Area sectors on the day the...

This note shows that the Svensson versus McCallum and Nelson controversy battled in the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Loius Review (September/ October 2005) can be mapped into a static version of a New Keynesian macro model that consists of an IS-equation, a Phillips curve and an inflation...

We develop a two-country business-cycle model of the US and the rest of the world with dollar dominance in trade invoicing, in cross-border credit, and in safe assets. The interplay between these elements - dollar trinity - rationalizes salient features of the Global Financial Cycle in the data:...