Using a Threshold Vector Autoregression framework identified via sign restrictions, we answer three questions: First, are fiscal policy shocks regime-dependent? Second, which variables are governing the regime? Third, what are the effects of fiscal policies on the main macroeconomic variables in...

Shrinkage estimators of the covariance matrix are known to improve the stability over time of the Global Minimum Variance Portfolio (GMVP), as they are less error-prone. However, the improvement over the empirical covariance matrix is not optimal for small values of n, the estimation sample...

This paper implements a simultaneous equations model to test for international financial contagion among developed sovereign credit markets between May 1, 2000 and September 1, 2010. Two alternative measures are proposed that identify credit crises in the tails of bond yield distributions, which...

This essay tries to put Simmel’s Theory of Money into the context of current discussions in economics concerning money. The essay has three parts. Part I looks at the contribution of Georg Simmel in its context, and offers remarks about the changing structure of economics as a discipline...

Studies on central bank reaction functions find that central banks only caring about inflation stability, like the ECB, seem to follow a standard Taylor rule in the sense that the interest rate reacts significantly to variations in the output gap. We explain this result by claiming that the...

This paper introduces a zero lower bound constraint on the nominal interest rate in a financial accelerator model with nominal and real rigidities. We .rst analyze the implicationsfor aggregate dynamics of binding the zero lower bound for shocks that depress the nominalinterest rate. We include...

This paper compares two approaches that aim to explain the lagged and persistent behaviorof inflation and output after a variation in the interest rate. Two variants that produce inertiaare added to a baseline DSGE model of sticky prices: 1) a lagged inflation indexation rulealong with habit...

This paper investigates exceptional phases of stock market cycles. Defined in Pagan and Sossounov (2003) as unusual, they are detected as outliers in the historical distribution. Moreover, this study completes the growing literature on stock market bulls and bears in several aspects. First,it...

This study aims at unifying the empirical research on the financial part of the monetary transmission process in the Eurozone between 1993 and 2002. After endogenously determining structural breaks, we select an optimal pass-through model for a series of national retail interest rates for each...

This study investigates the transmission of monetary policy onto retail bank interest rates inthe eight Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) that joined the European Union in2004. Focussing on the period from 1993 to 2003, we employ a unifying empirical passthrough model that allows...