Agency-based explanations of the great deprivation, contrasted with structure-based explanations, suffer not merely from the criticism of relying on irrational and irresponsible behavior of millions, including that of the most astute financial experts, but are also at a loss to explain why such...

Long-term interest rates of small open economies correlate strongly with the US long-term rate. Can central banks in those countries decouple from the US? An estimated DSGE model for the UK (vis-`a-vis the US) establishes three structural empirical results. (1) Comovement arises due to nominal...

The paper presents a comprehensive data set of all bonds issued by the sixteen German states (L¨ander) since 1992. It thus provides a complete picture of a capital market comparable in size to funds raised in the German fixed income market for corporations. The quantitative analysis reveals...

The prices of futures contracts on short-term interest rates are commonly used by central banks to gauge market expectations concerning monetary policy decisions. Excess returns - the difference between futures rates and the realized rates - are positive, on average, and statistically...

This paper provides a novel analysis of quantitative easing (QE) that focuses on its implicit fiscal dimension. The first segment examines the theory of the liquidity trap and introduces a distinction between a "weak" and "strong" liquidity trap. The second segment analyzes the impact of QE...

We use bank retail interest rates as price examples in a study of the determinants of price durations. The extraordinary richness of the data allows us to address some major open issues from the price rigidity literature, such as the functional form of the hazard of changing a price, the effect...

This paper explores a long dataset (1999–2005) of intraday prices on German long-term bond futures and examines market responses to major macroeconomic announcements and ECB monetary policy releases. German bond markets tend to react more strongly to the surprise component in US macro releases...

This paper has two parts. The first part will explore and document discrete time affine term structure models in a similar setup as seen in the celebrated papers from Backus, Foresi, Telmer (1998 and 1996) and Backus, Telmer and Wu (1999). However, the paper will concentrate on the multifactor...

This paper investigates the impact of policy interest rate news from the U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed) and the European Central Bank (ECB) on stock returns and volatilities of U.S. NYSE and German DAX listed commercial banks. We find that Fed news has the most influence on both U.S. and German...