The paper shows that there is a substantial degree of heterogeneity in forecast accuracy among Fed watchers. Based on a novel database for 268 professional forecasters since 1999, the average forecast error of FOMC decisions varies 5 to 10 basis points between the best and worst-performers...

The paper analyses the global spillovers of the Federal Reserve’s unconventional monetary policy measures. First, we find that Fed measures in the early phase of the crisis (QE1) were highly effective in lowering sovereign yields and raising equity markets, especially in the US relative to...

The paper investigates the impact of US quantitative easing (QE) on global non-financial corporate bond issuance. It distinguishes between two QE instruments, MBS/GSE debt and Treasury bonds, and disentangles between two channels of transmission of QE to global bond markets, namely flow effects...

The past years were characterized by unprecedented rises in prices of commodities such as oil or wheat and inflation rates moved up above the mark of two percent per annum. This led to a revival of the debate whether commodity prices indicate future CPI inflation and if they can be used as...

This paper offers an alternative explanation for the behavior of postwar US inflation by measuring a novel source of monetary policy time-inconsistency due to Cukierman (2002). In the presence of asymmetric preferences, the monetary authorities end up generating a systematic inflation bias...

We propose a method for estimating a subset of the parameters of a structural rational expectations model by exploiting changes in policy. We define a class of models, midway between a vector autoregression and a structural model, that we call the recoverable structure. As an application of our...

This paper analyses the information content of M1 for euro area real GDP since the beginning of the 1980s and reviews theoretical arguments on why real narrow money should help predict real GDP. We find that, unlike in the U.S., in the euro area, M1 has better and more robust forecasting...

This paper employs stochastic simulations of a small structural rational expectations model to investigate the consequences of the zero bound on nominal interest rates. We find that if the economy is subject to stochastic shocks similar in magnitude to those experienced in the U.S. over the...

On 11-12 May 2011, SUERF and the Belgian Financial Forum, in association with the Brussels Finance Institute and the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) organized the 29th SUERF Colloquium “New Paradigms in Money and Finance?” All the papers in the present SUERF Study are based on...

The paper analyses the global spillovers of the Federal Reserve's unconventional monetary policy measures. First, we find that Fed measures in the early phase of the crisis (QE1), but not since 2010 (QE2), were highly effective in lowering sovereign yields and raising equity markets in the US...