Existing methodologies for estimating a government's structural budget balance are reviewed and applied to the case of New Zealand. Besides the conventional cyclical adjustment, an assessment is made of other possible non-structural elements to the budgetary position, including the terms of...

Für Zwecke des privaten Konsums werden ständig Gegenwarts- und Zukunftsgüter bewertet und gehandelt. Ein zuverlässiges und umfassendes Maß für die allgemeine Kaufkraft des Geldes und deren Veränderung sollte diesem Grundsachverhalt Rechnung tragen. Im Unterschied zu konventionellen...

Standard economic intuition suggests that asset prices are more sensitive to news than other economic aggregates. This has led many researchers to conclude that asset price data would be very useful for the estimation of business cycle models containing news shocks. This paper shows how to...

We investigate the relationship between inflation uncertainty and monetary policy transmission in the U.S. economy. Monetary policy shocks are identified within the framework of nonlinear structural factor-augmented VARs which allow us to analyze several complementary hypotheses connecting IU...

For the purposes of private consumption present and future goods are constantly evaluated and traded. A reliable und comprehensive measure of the general purchasing power of money and its changes over time should take due account of this basic fact. In contrast to conventional statistical...

Funding liquidity, i.e., the ease with which firms, investors and consumers can obtain funding, is a key property of today's monetary transmission mechanism. We investigate empirically the role played by various measures of credit availability in shaping the dynamics of asset prices and the...

Abstract This paper analyzes the relationship between stock prices, house prices and consumption using data for 16 OECD countries. The panel data analysis suggests that the long-run responsiveness of consumption to permanent changes in stock prices is higher for countries with a market-based...

Abstract The question whether central banks should bear responsibility for financial stability remains unanswered. In connection with the use of interest rates, it is therefore not clear whether and how the Taylor rule should be augmented by an additional financial stability term. This paper...

We examine the dynamics of bank lending to the private sector for countries of the Euro area by applying a Markov switching error correction model. We identify for Belgium, Germany, Ireland and Portugal stable, mean reverting regimes and unstable regimes with no tendency to return to the long...

According to the theory of incomplete contracts, given nonverifiable entrepreneurial project choices together with divergent objectives between an entrepreneur and its outside financier, the entrepreneur can credibly pledge only part of its project outcome for external funding. Meanwhile,...