As well as the current one, the wave of globalization culminated in 1913 was marked by increasing accumulation of foreign exchange reserves. But what did ‘reserves' mean in the past, how were they managed, and how much relevant are the differences between then and now? This paper is the first...

As well as the current one, the wave of globalization culminated in 1913 was marked by increasing accumulation of foreign exchange reserves. But what did ‘reserves' mean in the past, how were they managed, and how much relevant are the differences between then and now? This paper is the first...

We use a TVP-VAR model to investigate possible changes in the time series properties of key Norwegian macroeconomic variables since the 1980s. The sample period is characterised by deregulation, globalization, sizable petroleum revenues, a switch from exchange rate to inflation targeting and...

This paper documents Norges Bank's role in the long transition period from a fixed exchange rate regime to inflation targeting in Norway. It is shown that the Bank's leadership and influential department leaders wanted more exchange rate flexibility from early on. However, due to the division of...

Using a Bayesian framework this paper provides a multivariate combination approach to prediction based on a distributional state space representation of predictive densities from alternative models. In the proposed approach the model set can be incomplete. Several multivariate time-varying...

The Zero Lower Bound (ZLB) on policy rates is one of the key monetary policy issues du jour. In this paper we investigate the problem of modelling and estimating the ZLB in a simple New Keynesian model with regime switches. The key features of the model include switches in the time preference...

We propose new forecast combination schemes for predicting turning points of business cycles. The combination schemes deal with the forecasting performance of a given set of models and possibly providing better turning point predictions. We consider turning point predictions generated by...

We present a new method for imposing parameter restrictions in Markov-Switching Vector Autoregression (MS-VAR) models. Our method is more flexible than competing methodologies and easily handles a range of parameter restrictions over different equations, regimes and parameter types. We also...