This discussion paper led to a publication in 'Computational Statistics & Data Analysis' 56(11), pp. 3398-1414.Important choices for efficient and accurate evaluation of marginal likelihoods by means of Monte Carlo simulation methods are studied for the case of highly non-elliptical posterior...

Estimation of conventional Taylor rules for Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Peru shows that central banks increase their repo rate in response to increases in the output gap and, except in Peru, to deviations of inflation expectations from target. Using a Markov-Switching methodology, it is found...

Using business survey data on German manufacturing firms, this paper provides tests for hypotheses formulated in capital market imperfection theories that predict distributional effects in the transmission of monetary policy. The business conditions of small firms are found to be somewhat more...

We develop a structural vector autoregressive framework that combines external instruments and heteroskedasticity for identification of monetary policy shocks. We show that exploiting both types of information sharpens structural inference, allows testing the relevance and exogeneity condition...