As is generally acknowledged, the failure of the perfect credit markets assumption underlying the permanent income hypothesis may be responsible for low consumption smoothing and observed excess sensitivity of consumption to current income. The economic literature puts forward a number of...

The misevaluation of risk in securitized financial products is central to understanding the financial crisis of 2007 - 8. This paper characterizes the evolution of factors affecting collateralized debt obligations based on subprime mortgages. A key feature of subprime-mortgage backed indices is...

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...

The paper develops an empirical no-arbitrage Gaussian affine term structure model to explain the dynamics of the German term structure of interest rates from 1979 through 1998. In contrast to most affine term structure models two risk factors that drive the dynamics are linked to observable...

We use a range of simple models and 22 years of real-time data vintages for the U.S. to assess the difficulties of estimating the equilibrium real interest rate in real time. Model specifications differ according to whether the time-varying equilibrium real rate is linked to trend growth, and...

This paper looks at the dynamic price relationship between spreads in the corporate bond market and credit default swaps (CDS). It picks up where Blanco et al (2005) leave off but is focused on European credit markets. The study is based on companies listed in the iTraxx CDS index and thus on...

This paper deals with a critical assessment and a reestimation of the "non-accelerating in ation rate of unemployment" (NAIRU) for Germany. There are quite a few obstacles to perceiving the NAIRU as an understandable and easy-to-use analytical instrument, suitable for economic policy: the...

This paper examines to what extent the build-up of 'global imbalances' since the mid-1990s can be explained in a purely real open-economy DSGE model in which agents' perceptions of long-run growth are based on filtering observed changes in productivity. We show that long-run growth estimates...

This paper deals with vehicular traffic management by communication technologies from Traffic Control Center point of view in road networks. The global goal is to manage the urban traffic by road traffic operations, controlling and interventional possibilities in order to minimize the traffic...

We study why a majority of trades still happen during the pit hours, i.e. when the trading pit is open, even after the pit ceased to be a liquid and informative venue. We investigate the case of 30-year U.S. Treasury futures using a ten-years-long intraday data set which contains the...