This report reflects on recent trends in fiscal and monetary policies at the onset of EU-enlargement. Particularly, the authors focus on necessary adjustment processes for future EU-members. How to smooth best the transition period between "normal" EU-accession and eventual participation in the...

In this paper, we propose a DSGE model with the term structure of interest rates drawing on the framework introduced by Andrés et al. (2004) and Marzo et al. (2008). In particular, we reproduce segmentation in financial markets by introducing bonds of different maturities and bond adjustment...

Macroeconomic literature has traditionally regarded public expenditure as yielding no utility per se to any agent in the economy. In line with a few previous contributions (Linneman and Schabert 2004, Bouakez and Rebei 2007) we build a New Keynesian DSGE model with real and nominal rigidities...

The present paper compares the performance in terms of second order accurate welfare of opportunistic non-linear Taylor rules and with respect to traditional linear Taylor rules. The macroeconomic model representing the benchmark for the analysis includes capital accumulation (with quadratic...

We study the joint movements of the returns on futures for crude oil, heating oil and natural gas. We model the leptokurtic behavior through the multivariate GARCH with dynamic conditional correlations and elliptical distributions introduced by Pelagatti and Rondena (2004). Energy futures...

This paper studies the forecasting properties of linear GARCH models for closing-day futures prices on crude oil, first position, traded in the New York Mercantile Exchange from January 1995 to November 2005. In order to account for fat tails in the empirical distribution of the series, we...