In 2001, the Fed has lowered interest rates in a series of cuts, starting from 6.5 % at the end of 2000 to 2.0 % by early November. This paper asks, whether the Federal Reserve Bank has been surprising the markets, taking as given the conventional view about the effect of monetary policy shocks....

In this paper, the structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model is used to analyze short-run and contemporaneous relationships between monetary aggregates and other macroeconomic variables. This requires imposing restrictions on the correlation structure of the VAR residuals. Different...

We investigate the small sample properties of two types of weak exogeneity tests in cointegrated VAR models that are frequently used in applied work. The first one is the standard Likelihood Ratio (LR) test in the Johansen framework. The second test is based on mapping the cointegrated VAR model...

In this paper, the empirical relevance of the credit channel for the explanation of monetary policy transmission in Germany during the period of monetary targeting from 1975 to 1998 is analyzed. While existing studies of the credit channel rely mostly on the analysis of monetary policy effects...

The objective of this study is to compare alternative computerized model-selection strategies in the context of the vector autoregressive (VAR) modeling framework. The focus is on a comparison of subset modeling strategies with the general-to-specific reduction approach automated by PcGets....

An introduction to vector autoregressive (VAR) analysis is given with special emphasis on cointegration. The models, estimating their parameters and specifying the autoregressive order, the cointegrating rank and other restrictions are discussed. Possibilities for model validation are also...

It is argued that standard impulse response analysis based on vector autoregressive models has a number of shortcomings. Although the impulse responses are estimated quantities, measures for sampling variability such as confidence intervals are often not provided. If confidence intervals are...

Alternative modeling strategies for specifying subset VAR models are considered. It is shown that under certain conditions a testing procedure based on t-ratios is equivalent to sequentially eliminating lags that lead to the largest improvement in a prespecified model selection criterion. A...

The small sample properties of two types of Chow tests are investigated in the context of multiple time series models. It is found that the tests may have substantially distorted size if the sample size is not large relative to the number of parameters in the model under study. In particular the...

In this paper we analyze the sources of German unemployment within a structural vector error correction model (SVECM) framework. For this purpose, we propose a method to estimate an exactly identified Subset SVECM, which is a SVECM with short run parameter restrictions. A cointegration analysis...