This paper analyses how to extract market expectations from asset prices, with a particular example: using the term structure of interest rates to estimate the probability the market attaches to the event that a country, Italy, joins the European Monetary Union at a given date. The extraction of...

The currently available empirical evidence shows remarkable differences between various estimates of the effects on U.S output of an exogenous shift in Federal tax liabilities. Shocks identified via the narrative method, imply a multiplier of about three over . an horizon of three years. Tax...

The expectations model of the term structure states that the yields to maturity of long term bonds are equal to the average of expected future short-term bond yields.This venerable model has been subjected to numerous empirical tests and almost invariably rejected. The empirical failure is...

This paper argues that a stable broad money demand for the euro area over the period 1980-2011 can be obtained by modelling cross border international portfolio allocation. As a consequence, model-based excess liquidity measures, namely the difference between actual M3 growth (net of the...

Nowadays a considerable amount of information on the behavior of the economy is readily available, in the form of large datasets of macroeconomic variables. Central bankers can be expected to base their decisions on this very large information set, so that it can be difficult to track their...

There has been a lot of interest recently in developing small scale rule-based empirical macro models for the analysis of monetary policy. These models, based on the conventional view that inflation stabilization should be a concern of monetary policy only, have typically neglected the role of...

This paper addresses the issue of forecasting the term structure. We provide a unified state-space modelling framework that encompasses different existing discrete-time yield curve models. within such framework we analyze the impact on forecasting performance of two crucial modelling choices,...

We study the relationship between the term structure of interest rates and fiscal policy by considering the Italian case. Empirical analysis has been so far rather inconclusive on this important topic. We abscribe such evidence to three problems: identification, regime-switching and maturity...

This paper reconsiders the developments of model evaluation in macroeconometrics over the last forty years. Our analysis starts from the failure of early empirical macroeconomic models caused by stagflation in the seventies. The different diagnosis of this failure are then analyzed to classify...

Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) models are now considered attractive by the profession not only from the theoretical perspective but also from an empirical standpoint. As a consequence of this development, methods for diagnosing the fit of these models are being proposed and...