Das Umfeld niedriger Zinsen ist weniger auf die Geldpolitik, sondern mehr auf globale Trends in der Investitionsnachfrage und in der Sparneigung sowie einen krisenbedingten Rückgang der Investitionen zurückzuführen. Mittelfristig kann die Überwindung der Bilanzrezession zu höheren...

We show an example of a small open economy - the Czech Republic - where the fiscal restriction was put in place between 2010 and 2013 in a negative output gap and zero lower bound on nominal interest rates. According to our results, such fiscal policy seems to have been mistaken, as the...

We propose a new approach to analyze economic shocks. Our new procedure identifies economic shocks as exogenous shifts in a function; hence, we call them "functional shocks." We show how to identify such shocks and how to trace their effects in the economy via VARs using "VARs with functional...

Existing methods for estimating nonlinear dynamic models are either highly computationally costly or rely on local approximations which often fail adequately to capture the nonlinear features of interest. I develop a new method, the discretization filter, for approximating the likelihood of...

This paper provides a quantitative assessment of equity options priced at the Zero Lower Bound, i.e., when interest rates are set essentially to zero. We obtain closed form formulas for American options when the Zero Lower Bound policy holds. We perform numerical implementation of American put...

This paper studies the transmission of changes in short-term interest rates to longer-term government bond yields when interest rates are at very low levels or negative. We focus on Switzerland, where short-term interest rates have been at zero since late 2008 and negative since the beginning of...

The celebrated Taylor rule provides a simple formula that aims to capture how the central bank interest rate is adjusted as a linear function of inflation and output gap. However, the rule does not take explicitly into account the zero lower bound on the interest rate. Prior studies on interest...

Seit Ausbruch der Finanzkrise haben Zentralbanken weltweit versucht, dem wirtschaftlichen Abschwung mit zum Teil unkonventionellen Maßnahmen entgegenzuwirken. Dieser Beitrag fasst einerseits die Maßnahmen der EZB zusammen und zeigt dabei auf, dass die EZB weniger unkonventionell als andere...

Recently, convincing evidence has been presented that the recession in the wake of the recent financial crisis resulted primarily from an overly levered housing sector that was forced to deleverage and cut consumption spending when faced with collapsing housing prices. Following this...

This paper makes three main points. Fiscal policy, first, may be needed in the long run to maintain full employment and avoid secular stagnation. If fiscal policy is used in this way, second, the long-run debt ratio depends (i) inversely on the rate of growth, (ii) inversely on government...