The financial crisis 2008-2009 and the European sovereign debt crisis have shown that stress on financial markets is important for analyzing and forecasting economic activity. Since financial stress is not directly observable but is presumably reflected in many financial market variables, it is...

This paper investigates the effectiveness of monetary-fiscal policies interaction on price and output growth in Nigeria. The dynamic correlations of variables have been captured by the analyses of impulse response and variance decomposition. From innovation analyses, the results suggest that the...

The Federal Reserve's 2009 program to purchase $300 billion of U.S. Treasury securities represented an unprecedented intervention in the Treasury market and provides a natural experiment with the potential to shed light on the price elasticities of Treasuries and theories of supply effects in...

The Federal Reserve's 2009 program to purchase $300 billion of U.S. Treasury securities represented an unprecedented intervention in the Treasury market and provides a natural experiment with the potential to shed light on the price elasticities of Treasuries and theories of supply effects in...

We use a dynamic factor model to consider if real wage growth in the US, UK and Germany at different percentiles of the distribution can be explained by factors that are common across countries or specific to each country. Our results suggest that common factors explain a large proportion of the...

This paper examines the determinants of the volatility in growth rates, seeking to expand on a very limited literature which has focused almost exclusively on financial determinants of volatility. An analysis of 41 variables and their effects on growth volatility yields some surprising results:...

This chapter reviews and synthesizes our current understanding of the shocks that drive economic fluctuations. The chapter begins with an illustration of the problem of identifying macroeconomic shocks, followed by an overview of the many recent innovations for identifying shocks. It then...

This brief examines two issues of current interest concerning inflation: (1) whether "well-anchored" expectations will help to restrain inflation's decline and whether an "un-anchoring" of expectations could lead to undesirably high inflation and (2) to what extent output (or utilization) gaps...

This paper evaluates short-run out-of-sample exchange rate predictability with real-time data for 15 OECD countries from 1973 to 2013. We consider the Taylor rule fundamentals model, where the variables that enter the Taylor rule are used to forecast exchange rate changes, and the Taylor rule...