This paper analyses the role of financial variables in the conduct of monetary policy. In the baseline model for the analysis of interest rules, the inflation rate depends on the output gap, which is solely determined by its own lags and the lagged short-term real interest rate. However, from a...

The contribution of this paper is to derive a bivariate distribution for inflation and output uncertainty with a well-defined role for subjective judgements. The marginal distributions for inflation and output growth are derived from uncertainty in the macro variables that are deemed to be...

Does the Church Tower Principle, i.e. geographical proximity between borrowing firm and lending bank, matter in credit risk management? If so, the bank might expose itself to a greater risk by lending to distant firms and should therefore respond by rationing them harder. In this paper we...

We present data from the Survey of Consumer Finances showing that the increased earnings (labor income) inequality, in combination with increased stockmarket partic- ipation, has roughly doubled stockholders’share of aggregate labor income in the last four decades. We explore the impact of the...

In this paper we discuss the recent experience of conducting monetary policy with a collegial board according to the Riksbank act. Interest rate decisions are normally taken with the aim to bring inflation in line with the 2 per cent inflation target one to two years ahead. When there are...

In this paper key points in the development of the present Swedish inflation-targeting strategy are analysed. Since the implementation of the inflation target strategy began in 1993, three different phases are distinguished: the establishment of the inflation target, the communication of...

A general model is proposed for flexibly estimating the density of a continuous response variable conditional on a possibly high-dimensional set of covariates. The model is a finite mixture of asymmetric student-t densities with covariate dependent mixture weights. The four parameters of the...

We introduce a non-Gaussian dynamic mixture model for macroeconomic forecasting. The Locally Adaptive Signal Extraction and Regression (LASER) model is designed to capture relatively persistent AR processes (signal) contaminated by high frequency noise. The distribution of the innovations in...

We consider forecast combination and, indirectly, model selection for VAR models when there is uncertainty about which variables to include in the model in addition to the forecast variables. The key difference from traditional Bayesian variable selection is that we also allow for uncertainty...

In theory, prices of current-month federal funds futures contracts should reflect market expectations of near-term movements in the Federal Reserve's target level for the federal funds rate. However, empirical results show that such measures of market expectations are too noisy to predict...