The aim of this paper is to analyze the hypotheses of German dominanceand asymmetry in the European Monetary System (EMS).Weuse monthly data for British, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanishand US interest rates from January 1979 to the second half of 1997. Inparticular, we test the stability...

In this study we forecast the term structure of FIBOR/EURIBOR swap rates by means of recursive vector autoregressive (VAR) models. In advance, a principal components analysis (PCA) is adopted to reduce the dimensionality of the term structure. To evaluate ex–ante forecasting performance for...

The paper proposes a data driven adaptive model selection strategy. The selection criterionmeasures economic ex-ante forecasting content by means of trading implied cash flows.Empirical evidence suggests that the proposed strategy is neither exposed to selection biasnor to the risk of choosing...

This paper addresses the question of the British state of convergence towards the Euro area, compared to the USA. Economically, the analysis is based on dependences in the money and capital markets, namely the uncovered interest parity (UIP) and the expectation hypothesis of the term structure...

Stylized facts on output and interest rates in the U.S. have so far proved hard to match with business cycle models. But these findings do not acknowledge that the economy might well be driven by different shocks, and by each in different ways. I estimate covariances of output, nominal and real...

In this paper we adopt a principal components analysis (PCA) to reduce the dimensionality of the term structure and employ autoregressive models (AR) to forecast principal components which, in turn, are used to forecast swap rates. Arguing in favor of structural variation, we propose data...

Controllability of longer-term interest rates requires that the persis-tence of their deviations from the central bank's policy rate (i.e. thepolicy spreads) remains suffciently low. This paper applies fractionalintegration techniques to assess the persistence of policy spreads ofeuro area money...

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,...