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 investigate the volatility of real interest rates in 10 countries. An equilibrium model with financial frictions mimics the volatility of real rates and predicts a negative correlation of the conditional variance with the business cycle. Our contribution investigates the level and conditional...

This paper evaluates the properties of nominal interest rates as indicators of inflation expectations. Are they unbiased? How precise are they? To arrive at robust results, a range of different methods are applied on several S and UK data sets. The results show that the interest rate level is a...

Several alternative news-based Economic Policy Uncertainty indices have been developer for Spain and a few other European countries. These alternative indices differ in the selection of keywords, newspaper coverage, and a scaling factor that is used to calculate the EPU index from the raw news...

Using data from Germany, Japan, UK, and the U.S., we explore possible threshold cointegration in nominal short- and long-run interest rates with corresponding inflation rates. Traditional cointegration implies perfect mean reversion in real rates and hence confirms the Fisher hypothesis....

In many economies, the monetary policy instrument is the level of short-term nominal interest rates, but the monetary policy stance might be better characterised by the ex-ante real interest rate that this nominal rate implies, relative to some 'neutral' or 'natural' real rate of interest. In...

This paper illustrates the importance of density forecasting in portfolio decision making involving bonds of different maturities. The forecast performance of an atheoretic and a theory informed model of bond returns is evaluated. The decision making environment is fully described for an...

Motivated by economic-theory concepts - the Fisher hypothesis and the theory of the term structure - we consider a small set of simple bivariate closed-loop time-series models for the prediction of price inflation and of long- and short-term interest rates. The set includes vector...