This paper estimates a nonlinear Threshold-VAR to investigate if a Keynesian liquidity trap due to a speculative motive was in place in the U.S. Great Depression and the recent Great Recession. We find clear evidence in favor of a breakdown of the liquidity effect after an unexpected increase in...

Understanding the impact of changes in interest rates on house prices is important for managing house price bubbles and ensuring housing affordability. This paper investigates the effect of interest rates on regional house price to income measures based on a non-linear smooth transition VAR...

Motivated by the increasing use of forward guidance, we consider DSGE models in which the central bank holds the policy rate fixed for an extended period of time. Private agents' beliefs about how long the fixed-rate regime will last influences current output and inflation. We estimate the...

Abandoning an objective function with multiple targets and adopting a single mandate can be an effective way for a central bank to overcome the classic time-inconsistency problem. We show that the choice of a particular single mandate depends on an economy's level of trade openness and the...

We estimate a nonlinear VAR model to study the real effects of monetary policy shocks in regimes characterized by high vs. low macroeconomic uncertainty. We find unexpected monetary policy moves to exert a substantially milder impact in presence of high uncertainty. We then exploit the set of...

We employ a non-recursive identification scheme to identify the effects of a monetary policy shock in a Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVARs) model for the U.S. post-WWII quarterly data. The identification of the shock is achieved via heteroskedasticity, and different on-impact macroeconomic...

This paper estimates a nonlinear Interacted-VAR model to investigate whether the effectiveness of monetary policy shocks in the Euro area is influenced by the level of European uncertainty. Generalized Impulse Response Functions à la Koop et al. (1996) suggest that the peak and cumulative...

We propose a novel identification-robust test for the null hypothesis that an estimated new-Keynesian model has a reduced form consistent with the unique stable solution against the alternative of sunspot-driven multiple equilibria. Our strategy is designed to handle identification failures as...

This paper studies the challenge that increasing the inflation target poses to equilibrium determinacy in a medium-sized New Keynesian model without indexation fitted to the Great Moderation era. For moderate targets of the inflation rate, such as 2 or 4 percent, the probability of...

Cholesky-VAR impulse responses estimated with post-1984 U.S. data predict modest macroeconomic reactions to monetary policy shocks. We interpret this evidence by employing an estimated medium-scale DSGE model of the business cycle as a DataGenerating Process in a Monte Carlo exercise in which a...