If floating exchange rates stabilize shocks rather than create shocks, a country that joins a monetary union or fixes its exchange rate looses a stabilizing mechanism. We use a first difference structural VAR on trade weighted macroeconomic data to study the role of floating exchange rates for...

The strong response of long-term interest rates to macroeconomic shocks has typically been explained in terms of informational asymmetries between the central bank and private agents. The standard models assume that the equilibrium real interest rate is constant over time and independent of...

Data on short investments in Swedish long-term bonds as the bonds mature contains unusually rich information about the relationship between duration and the first and second moments of bond returns. We identify three different channels through which duration affects bond returns. The liquidity...

We show that empirical results concerning the behavior of floating exchange rates differ between otherwise identical cointegrated and non-cointegrated VAR models. In particular, virtually all ten-year movements in nominal exchange rates are due to fundamental supply and demand shocks when long...

Empirical evidence on the relationship between technology shocks and e.g. hours worked hinges crucially on the identification of the unobservable technological progress. In this paper, we study different measures of technology in order to find out (i) to what extent they capture the same...

Tentative evidence suggests that the empiricalfailure of uncovered interest parity (UIP) is confined to short-term interest rates. Tests of UIP for long-term interest rates are however hampered by various data problems. By focusing on short investments in long-term bonds, these data problems can...

The co-movements of nominal exchange rates and short-term interest rates as the economy is hit by shocks is a potential source of ex post deviations from uncovered interest rate parity. This paper investigates whether an established model of endogenous monetary policy in an open economy is...

Continuos credibility effects are incorporated into a simple model of optimal monetary policy. The resulting model provides explanations for a number of folk theorems about credibility in monetary policy. A central bank with low initial credibility pursues a more restrictive policy than a...

In an attempt to move beyond the purchasing power parity hypothesis, this paper studies two issues. First, the causes of movements of real exchange rates are investigated. In contrast to the typical result, supply shocks are found to dominate the long-run variance decompositions for all...

Previous studies of the sources of real exchange rate fluctuations have concluded that real demand shocks account for the bulk of the movements in real exchange rates. In this paper, bilateral real exchange rates between the US, the UK, Germany and Japan are investigated using a statistical...