We analyze if and to what extent fundamental macroeconomic factors, temporary influencesor more structural factors have contributed to the low levels of US bond yields over the lastfew years. For that purpose, we start with a general model of interest rate determination. Theempirical part...

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...

We extend the basic (representative-household) New Keynesian [NK] model ofthe monetary transmission mechanism to allow for a spread between the interestrate available to savers and borrowers, that can vary for either exogenous orendogenous reasons. We nd that the mere existence of a positive...

The paper presents a comprehensive data set of all bonds issued by the sixteenGerman states (Länder) since 1992. It thus provides a complete picture of acapital market comparable in size to funds raised in the German fixed incomemarket for corporations. The quantitative analysis reveals that...

This is study empirically examine the impact of market conditions on credit spreads asmotivated by recently developed structural credit risk models. Using credit default swap(CDS) spreads, we find that, in the time series, average credit spreads are decreasing inGDP growth rate, but increasing...

In this paper we analyzed the violations of UIP for the Swiss Franc against the Dollar, the Euro, the Yen, thePound and the Canadian Dollar using recent data up to fall 2008. This exercise provides the following mainresults : first the Swiss interest rate puzzle disappeared, i.e. mean returns on...

As is well known, the uncovered interest rate parity fails in the short run but usually holds in the long run. This paper analyses the long and short run interest rate parity of 10 mayor OECD currencies and finds that there is a long run failure of the uncovered interest rate parity condition...

We propose an empirical approach to determine the various economic sourcesdriving the US yield curve. We allow the conditional dynamics of the yield at differ-ent maturities to change in reaction to past information coming from several relevantpredictor variables. We consider both endogenous,...

When a policymaker is better informed than the public, public beliefs about the hidden informationemerge as additional state variables, managed by the policymaker. General methodsare presented to compute optimal commitment and discretion policies.Under commitment, policy is additive in two...