The European Central Bank's asset purchase programs, while intended to stabilize the economy, may have unintended side effects on financial stability. This paper aims at gauging the effects on financial markets, the banking sector, and lending to non-financial firms. Using a structural vector...

In this paper we investigate the relationship between labor's share, the market power of firms and the elasticity of output with respect to labor input using an approach based on an unobserved components model. The approach yields time-varying estimates of the market power and the elasticity....

The recent plunge in oil prices has brought into question the generally accepted view that lower oil prices are good for the United States and the global economy. In this paper, using a quarterly multi-country econometric model, we first show that a fall in oil prices tends relatively quickly to...

In this paper, we propose a model based on multivariate decomposition of multiplicative—absolute values and signs—components of several returns. In the m-variate case, the marginals for the m absolute values and the binary marginals for the m directions are linked through a 2m-dimensional...

In this paper, we study the effectiveness of carry trade strategies during and after the financial crisis using a flexible approach to modeling currency returns. We decompose the currency returns into multiplicative sign and absolute return components, which exhibit much greater predictability...

Nominal and real interest rates in advanced economies have been decreasing since the mid-1980s and reached historical low levels in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Understanding why interest rates have fallen is essential for both monetary policy and financial stability. This paper...

It is well-known that there is a large degree of uncertainty around Rogoff's (1996) consensus half-life of the real exchange rate. To obtain a more efficient estimator, we develop a system method that combines the Taylor rule and a standard exchange rate model to estimate half-lives. Further, we...

The concept of integrated stochastic processes is widely used in empirical macroeconomics; and cointegration analysis is an important framework to analyze economic time series both in single equation and in system approaches. This framework is not only suited to study the relationships between...

Informationally efficient prices are a necessary requirement for optimal resource allocation in the real estate market. Prices are informationally efficient if they reflect buildings' benefit to marginal buyers, thereby taking account of all available information on future market development....

In this paper, the empirical relevance of the credit channel for the explanation of monetary policy transmission in Germany during the period of monetary targeting from 1975 to 1998 is analyzed. While existing studies of the credit channel rely mostly on the analysis of monetary policy effects...