Under the Maastricht Treaty and the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) European Union (EU) Member States commit themselves to avoid excessive deficits over 3% of GDP and to pursue the medium-term objective of budgetary positions close to balance or in surplus. The SGP provides also regulation for...

The rank of the spectral density matrix conveys relevant information in a variety of statistical modelling scenarios. This note shows how to estimate the rank of the spectral density matrix at any given frequency. The method presented is valid for any hermitian positive de?nite matrix estimate...

This paper explains to what extent excess reserves are and should be relevant today in the implementation of monetary policy, focusing on the speci?c case of the operational framework of the Eurosystem. In particular, this paper studies the impact that changes to the operational framework for...

Standard measures of prices are often contaminated by transitory shocks. This has prompted economists to suggest the use of measures of underlying in?ation to formulate monetary policy and assist in forecasting observed in?ation. Recent work has concentrated on modelling large datasets using...

The quantity theory of money predicts a positive relationship between monetary growth and inflation over long-run horizons. However, in the short-run, transitory shocks to either money or inflation can obscure the inflationary signal stemming from money. The spectral analysis of time series...

Testing and estimating the rank of a matrix of estimated parameters is key in a large variety of econometric modelling scenarios. This paper describes general methods to test for and estimate the rank of a matrix, and provides details on a variety of modelling scenarios in the econometrics...

Global financial integration unlocks a huge potential for international risk sharing. We examine the degree to which international equity holdings act as a risk sharing device in industrial and emerging economies. We split equity returns into investment income (dividend distribution) and capital...

We study market perception of sovereign credit risk in the euro area during the financial crisis. In our analysis we use a parsimonious CDS pricing model to estimate the probability of default (PD) and the loss given default (LGD) as perceived by financial markets. We find that separate...

In this paper we study the impact that financial reputation and official market interventions have on the timing and amount of debt issuance decisions by banks. To do so, we propose an extension of the two-part modelling framework of Cragg (1971, eq. 7 and 9) to accommodate random effects. We...