The objective of this study is to investigate the behaviour of monetary and fiscal authorities in the Euro area. Our main contribution is joint modelling of behaviour of the two authorities. Our investigation highlights a number of facts. The systematic monetary policies adopted by the...

Observed policy rates are smooth. Why should central banks smooth interest rates? We investigate if model uncertainty and parameters instability are a valid reason. We do so by implementing a novel ´´thick recursive modelling´´ approach within the framework of small structural macroeconomic...

Exogenous measures of monetary policy shocks, directly derived from financial market information, are used in close (US) and open (US-Germany) economy VAR models to evaluate the robustness of the dynamic effect of monetary policy obtained from traditional identified VAR. The empirical analysis...

In this paper we jointly estimate a forward-looking reaction function for the three-month rate alongwith a term structure relationship linking the six-month interest rates to current and expected future three-month rates. In our empirical model the response of the six-month interest rates to...

In this paper we propose an approach to identify indipendently the parameters describing the structure of the economy from the parameters describing central bank preferences. We first estimate the parameters describing the structure of the US economy by considering a parsimonious specification...

This paper explores the extent to which predictability of asset returns could be exploited for dynamic portfolio allocation among several (seven) assets taking model uncertainty explicitly into account.We consider model uncertainty when solving the problem of a representative fund manager who...

The rate of inflation in the US has declined from an average of 4.5% in the period 1960-79 to an average of 3.6% in 1980-98. Between those two periods, the standard deviations of inflation and the output gap have also declined. These facts can be attributed to the interaction of three possible...

Nowadays a considerable amount of information on the behavior of the economy is readily available, in the form of large datasets of macroeconomic variables. Central bankers can be expected to base their decisions on this very large information set, so that it can be difficult to track their...

This paper argues that a stable broad money demand for the euro area over the period 1980-2011 can be obtained by modelling cross border international portfolio allocation. As a consequence, model-based excess liquidity measures, namely the difference between actual M3 growth (net of the...

In this paper we relate the very persistent component of interest rates to a specific demographic variable, MYt, the proportion of middle-aged to young population. We first reconsider the results in Fama (2006) to document how MYt captures the long run component identified by Fama in his...