This paper demonstrates that the ability of the yield spread to predict output fluctuations is contingent on the monetary authority's reaction function. In particular, expectations of monetary policy actions are crucial for the spread to predict output conditional on the short-rate. Furthermore,...

Exogenous measures of monetary policy shocks, directly derived from financial market information, are used in close (U.S.) and open (U.S.-Germany) economy VAR models to evaluate the robustness of the dynamic effect of monetary policy obtained from traditional identified VAR. The empirical...