We investigate the money-market impact of the reform of the operational framework of the European Central Bank that took place in March 2004. We estimate a structural bivariate GARCH model with the overnight rate and 1-year swap rate, where identifying restrictions are imposed on the conditional...

This paper investigates how monetary policy can help to avoid the liquidity trap by studying the experience of Japan. First, I analyze how the Bank of Japan conducted interest rate policy over the 1990s as the economy entered a deflationary slump. I use a new method of estimating the policy rule...

This paper investigates how the implementation of monetary policy affects the dynamics and the volatility of the federal funds rate. Since the early 1980s, the most important changes in the Fed?s conduct of monetary policy refer to the role of the federal funds rate target and the reserve...

Global excess liquidity roaming the world’s financial markets (or its sudden absence) is sometimes believed to limit sovereign monetary policy even in large economies such as the euro area. However, there is still discussion about what constitutes global excess liquidity and how exactly it...

Overnight money market rates are the predominant operational target of monetary policy. As a consequence, central banks have redesigned the implementation of monetary policy to keep the deviations of the overnight rate from the key policy rate small and short-lived. This paper uses fractional...

We study the dynamics of inflation persistence in 45 countries for the period 1960-2008. We use a nonparametric unit root test robust to nonlinearities, error distributions, structural breaks and outliers, many of them typical features of inflation data, and a test for multiple changes in...

This paper elaborates on the alternative measure of persistence recently suggested in Marques (2004), which is based on the idea of mean reversion. A formal distinction between the “unconditional probability of a given process not crossing its mean in period t” and its estimator, is made...

We propose a theoretical framework for assessing whether a forecast model estimated over one period can provide good forecasts over a subsequent period. We formalize this idea by defining a forecast breakdown as a situation in which the out-of-sample performance of the model, judged by some loss...

We propose a benchmark prior for the estimation of vector autoregressions: a prior about initial growth rates of the modeled series. We first show that the Bayesian vs frequentist small sample bias controversy is driven by different default initial conditions. These initial conditions are...

Shadow banking, as one of the main sources of financial stability concerns, is the subject of much international debate. In broad terms, shadow banking refers to activities related to credit intermediation and liquidity and maturity transformation that take place outside the regulated banking...