This paper identifies shocks to the Federal Reserve's inflation target as VAR innovations that make the largest contribution to future movements in long-horizon inflation expectations. The effectiveness of this scheme is documented via Monte-Carlo experiments. The estimated impulse responses...

We use a factor model with stochastic volatility to decompose the time-varying variance of Macro economic and Financial variables into contributions from country-specific uncertainty and uncertainty common to all countries. We find that the common component plays an important role in driving the...

This paper investigates if the impact of uncertainty shocks on the US economy has changed over time. To this end, we develop an extended Factor Augmented VAR model that simultaneously allows the estimation of a measure of uncertainty and its time-varying impact on a range of variables. We find...

DSGE (Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium) models are the common workhorse of modern macroeconomic theory. Whereas story-telling and policy analysis were in the forefront of applications since its inception, the forecasting perspective of DSGE models is only recently topical. In this study,...

This paper examines how and to what extent parameter estimates can be biased in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model that omits the zero lower bound constraint on the nominal interest rate. Our experiments show that most of the parameter estimates in a standard sticky-price DSGE...

In this paper, we analyse the effects of the stimulus packages adopted by the German government during the Great Recession. We employ a standard mediumscale dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model extended by nonoptimising households and a detailed fiscal sector. In particular, the...

The 2008 financial crisis has shown that financial busts can influence the real economy. However, there is less evidence to suggest that the same holds for financial booms. Using a Markov-Switching vector autoregressive model and euro area data, I show that financial booms tend to be less...