This paper explores the potential effectiveness of the ECB s Outright Monetary Transaction (OMT) program in safeguarding an appropriate monetary policy transmission. Since the program aims at manipulating bank lending rates by conducting sovereign bond purchases on secondary markets, a stable...

With the Federal Funds rate approaching the zero lower bound, the U.S. Federal Reserve adopted a range of unconventional monetary policy measures known as Quantitative Easing (QE). Quantifying the impact QE has on the real economy, however, is not straightforward as standard tools such as VAR...

Apart from a priori assumptions on instantaneous or long run effects of structural shocks, sign restrictions have become a prominent means for structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) analysis. Moreover, second order heterogeneity of systems of times series can be fruitfully exploited for...

This paper studies the conditional patterns of unemployment dynamics in Germany. We employ a structural VAR model and identify a technology shock and two policy shocks by using standard restrictions. Interestingly, the worker reallocation process varies substantially with the identified shocks....

We integrate systemic financial instability in an empirical macroeconomic model for the euro area. We find that at times of widespread financial instability the macroeconomy functions fundamentally differently from tranquil times. We employ a richly specified Markov-Switching...

This paper examines the effects of expansionary technology shocks (shocks that increase labor productivity and factor inputs) as opposed to contractionary technology shocks (shocks that increase labor productivity, but decrease factor inputs). We estimate these two shocks jointly based on a...

We estimate the low-frequency relationship between fiscal deficits and inflation and pay special attention to its potential time variation by estimating a time-varying VAR model for U.S. data from 1900 to 2011. We find the strongest relationship neither in times of crisis nor in times of high...