Standard stochastic growth models provide theoretical restrictions on output decomposition which can be used to investigate whether productivity shocks played a major role in observed business cycles. Applying these restrictions to US data leads to the following findings: i) Business cycles...

This paper develops a simple sequential multiple horizon non-causation test strategy for trivariate VAR models (with one auxiliary variable). We apply the test strategy to a rolling window study of money supply and real income, with the price of oil, the unemployment rate and the spread between...

This paper introduces methods for computing impulse response functions that do not require specification and estimation of the unknown dynamic multivariate system itself. The central idea behind these methods is to estimate flexible local projections at each period of interest rather than...

The quadratic form of policy makers' loss function has gained a wide consensus in monetary policy analysis mainly because of its analytical tractability. A number of researchers, however, have recently proposed alternative functional forms which have also proved to yield tractable solutions of...

Monetary policy has been usually analyzed in the context of small macroeconomic models where central banks are allowed to exploit a limited amount of information. Under these frameworks, researchers typically derive the optimality of aggressive monetary rules, contrasting with the observed...

In this paper we assess whether monetary variables convey marginal information on the state of the Italian economy, taking as a benchmark the forecasting errors generated by the quarterly model used by the Bank of Italy in the 1990s. We follow two alternative approaches. First we map monetary...

In this paper we analyse disinflation policy in two environments. In the first, the central bank has perfect knowledge, in the sense that it understands and observes the process by which private sector inflation expectations are generated; in the second, the central bank has to learn the private...

Factor-augmented VARs (FAVARs) have combined standard VARs with factor analysis to exploit large data sets in the study of monetary policy. FAVARs enjoy a number of advantages over VARs: they allow a better identification of the monetary policy shock; they can avoid the use of a single variable...

This paper integrates imposing a factor structure on residuals in vector autoregressions (VARs) into structural VAR analysis. Identification, estimation and testing procedures are discussed. The paper applies this approach to the well-known problem of studying the effects of monetary policy in...

This paper investigates the asymmetric effects of monetary shocks when the=20 impact of monetary policy on real activity works through state-dependent=20 variables. We use a nonlinear model, the multiple regime smooth transition=20 autoregressive model, that allows the effects of shocks to vary...