Government policy to encourage home ownership has a long history in Australia. In 1918, for example, the War Service Homes Act made provision for 45 year loans to ex‐service personnel to facilitate home purchase. Since then, home ownership has been encouraged by a variety of measures. A short...

The misevaluation of risk in securitized financial products is central to understand- ing the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008. This paper characterizes the evolution of factors affecting collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) based on subprime mortgages. A key feature of subprime-mortgage backed...

The second half of AUgust 1998 was dominated by two events. From 14 to 28 August the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) intervened in the Hong Kong equity markets to prevent a speculative double play against their currency board. On 17 August Russia announced its default on sovereign bonds....

We examine whether contagion tests are affected by controls for volatility clustering and the collection of synchronized data sets. Without controlling for volatility clustering synchronization does not apparently matter. Once volatility clustering is accounted for synchronized data dramatically...

Empirical modelling of the international linkages between the Euro Area and the US requires an open economy specification. This paper proposes and implements a structural VECM framework which imposes long run and short run cross-economy restrictions based on theoretically motivated restrictions...

Two impediments to effective monetary policy operation include illiquidity in bond markets and the move towards the zero bound of interest rates. Either or both of these scenarios have been evident in many countries in the last decade, raising the suggestion that alternative means of enacting...

Time series analysis for the Euro Area requires the availability of sufficiently long historical data series, but the appropriate construction methodology has received little attention. The benchmark dataset, developed by the European Central Bank for use in its Area Wide Model (AWM), is based...

Jointly identifying the effects of both fiscal and monetary policy shocks in an open economy structural VAR poses identification challenges. The innovations in this paper are to combine the methods of identification via sign restrictions, cointegration and traditional exclusion restrictions...