Some regulatory reforms do not change just a specific signal that can be represented by a quantitative continuous variable, such as a tax rate, a price cap, or an emission threshold. The standard theory of reform in applied welfare economics (going back to contributions by e.g. Ramsey, Samuelson...

This paper empirically tests whether monetary policy can have a perverse effect on aggregate demand in emerging economies, because of short-term speculative inflows. For this purpose, a bayesian VAR is estimated on a panel of six major emerging countries. Monetary and risk shocks are identified...

We propose a Bayesian infinite hidden Markov model to estimate time-varying parameters in a vector autoregressive model. The Markov structure allows for heterogeneity over time while accounting for state-persistence. By modelling the transition distribution as a Dirichlet process mixture model,...

Why are interest rates so low in the Unites States? We find that they are low primarily because the premium for safety and liquidity has increased since the late 1990s, and to a lesser extent because economic growth has slowed. We reach this conclusion using two complementary perspectives: a...

The years following the Great Recession were challenging for forecasters. Unlike other deep downturns, this recession was not followed by a swift recovery, but generated a sizable and persistent output gap that was not accompanied by deflation as a traditional Phillips curve relationship would...

This paper presents a framework for empirical analysis of dynamic macroeconomic models using Bayesian filtering, with a specific focus on the state-space formulation of New Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (NK DSGE) models with multiple regimes. We outline the theoretical...

Hours per capita measures based on the private sector as usually included in the set of observables for estimating macroeconomic models are affected by low-frequent demographic trends and sectoral shifts that cannot be explained by standard models. Further, model-based output gap estimates are...

We study cross-country differences in monetary policy transmission across the large four euro-area countries (France, Germany, Italy and Spain) using a large Bayesian vector autoregressive model with endogenous prior selection. Drawing both on the posterior distributions of the cross-country...

Using a novel database of domestic financial reforms in 90 countries from 1973 to 2014, we document that global financial liberalization followed an S-curve path: reforms were slow and gradual in early periods, accelerated during the 1990s, and slowed down after 2000. We estimate a learning...

Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models use modern macroeconomic theory to explain and predict comovements of aggregate time series over the business cycle and to perform policy analysis. We explain how to use DSGE models for all three purposes - forecasting, story telling, and...