Central bankers’ conventional wisdom suggests that nominal interest rates should be raised to implement a lower inflation target. In contrast, I show that the standard New Keynesian monetary model predicts that nominal interest rates should bedecreased to attain this goal. Real interest rates,...

We propose a new approach to forecasting the term structure of interest rates, which allows to efficiently extract the information contained in a large panel of yields. In particular, we use a large Bayesian Vector Autoregression (BVAR) with an optimal amount of shrinkage towards univariate AR...

After outlining some of the monetary developments associated with Quantitative Easing (QE), we measure the impact of the UK's initial 2009-10 QE Programme on bonds and other assets. First, we use a macro-finance yield curve both to create a counterfactual path for bond yields and to estimate the...

We undertake a variance decomposition of index-linked bond returns for the US, UK and Iceland. In all cases, news about future excess returns is the key driver though only for Icelandic bonds are returns independent of inflation.

After decades using monetary aggregates as the main instrument of monetary policy and having different varieties of crawling peg exchange rate regimes, Colombia adopted a full-fledged inflation-targeting (IT) regime in 1999, with inflation as the nominal anchor, a floating exchange rate, and the...

Long-term interest rates in a number of small-open inflation targeting economies co-move more strongly with US long-term rates than with short-term rates in those economies. We augment a standard small open-economy model with imperfectly substitutable government bonds and time-varying term...

This paper employs a Zero Lower Bound (ZLB) consistent shadow-rate model to decompose UK nominal yields into expectation and term premia components. Compared to a standard affine term structure model, it performs relatively better in a ZLB setting and effectively captures the countercyclical...

Microfinance institutions (MFIs) have been successful in providing credit to millions of low-income borrowers in groups previously excluded from formal financial services, but they often charge interest rates that many claim are excessive. We examine microfinance interest rates and their...