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...

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...

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...

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...

We present a general equilibrium model of the new neoclassical synthesis that has the same levelof generality as the Arrow-Debreu model. This involves a stochastic multi-period economy with amonetary sector and sticky commodity prices. We formulate the notion of a sticky price equilibriumwhere...

This paper follows up on recent studies of the Eurozone interest rate pass-through. Using a generalized empirical approach that allows for a variety of different specifications of the pass-through, including asymmetric adjustment, the role of interest rate expectations, proxied by EURIBOR...

This paper presents evidence on the industry effects of bank lending in Germany and asks whether bank lending to single industries depends on industry-specific bank credit demand or on monetary policy as determinant of bank credit supply. To this end, we estimate individual bank lending...

This paper explores how decentralized, national fiscal policies interact with a common monetary policy in a monetary union. We show that fiscal policy plays a more important role in stabilizing country-specific shocks than with national monetary policies. Whereas monetary unification with an...

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...

Empirical studies reject uncovered interest parity. Experimental and survey data studies reject rational expectations and find evidence of adaptive, regressive, bandwagon and distributed lag expectations. In this paper we investigate how these two findings are related. We show that uncovered...