This paper compares the communication strategies of the Fed and the ECB and their impact on financial markets. Interest rates options were used to calculate daily probability distributions of market expectations and to examine how they are modified by central banks’ announcements. We found...

We argue that regulation can improve the performance of conventional banks up to a limit, but cannot eliminate the deficiencies resulting from the use of the conventional loan contract. Islamic finance requires complicated and costly procedures compared to conventional finance. Yet, it has...

Applying the MCMC algorithm for time varying Bayesian VAR model, I have estimated the impulse response, stochastic volatility and forecast error variance decomposition. The model allows both parameters and stochastic volatility to vary. The impulse response of unemployment, inflation and...

We argue that regulation can improve the performance of conventional banks up to a limit, but cannot eliminate the deficiencies resulting from the use of the conventional loan contract. Islamic finance requires complicated and costly procedures compared to conventional finance. Yet, it has...

This paper presents Bank of Canada staff's current assessment of the US neutral rate, along with a newly developed set of models on which that assessment is based. The overall assessment is that the US neutral rate currently lies in a range of 1.75 to 2.75 percent. This represents a decline of...

This paper presents Bank of Canada staff's current assessment of the US neutral rate, along with a newly developed set of models on which that assessment is based. The overall assessment is that the US neutral rate currently lies in a range of 1.75 to 2.75 percent. This represents a decline of...

This paper analyses the effects of open market operations on interest rates in a model in which agents must pay a fixed cost to exchange assets and cash. Asset markets are endogenously segmented in that some agents choose to pay the fixed cost and some do not. When the fixed cost is zero, the...

Procyclical assets tend to rise in value when the economy is expanding and fall with the advent of a recession. Countercyclical assets are instead negatively correlated with the state of the economy. Despite the use of optimization methods, hedging, and ad hoc rebalancing techniques most...

After the 2008 financial collapse, the now popular measure of implied systemic risk called the absorption ratio was introduced. This statistic measures how closely the economy's markets are coupled. The more closely financial markets are coupled the more susceptible they are to systemic...

I show that a congruent, parsimonious, encompassing model discovered using David Hendry's econometric modelling approach and Autometrics can overcome the many inadequacies of the typical static models of US Treasury returns regressed on macroeconomic announcements. The typical specification...