Model uncertainty has the potential to change importantly how monetary policy should be conducted, making it an issue that central banks cannot ignore. In this paper, I use a standard new Keynesian business cycle model to analyze the behavior of a central bank that conducts policy with...

Density forecast combinations are becoming increasingly popular as a means of improving forecast `accuracy’, as measured by a scoring rule. In this paper we generalise this literature by letting the combination weights follow more general schemes. Sieve estimation is used to optimise the score...

We study the joint dynamics of foreign capital flows and real activity during the recent boom-bust cycle of the Spanish economy, using a three-country New Keynesian model with credit-constrained households and firms, a construction sector and a government. We estimate the model using...

The paper examines whether central banks should be committed to achieving price stability (a low-inflation target), and how strong (explicit) their long-term monetary commitment should be. For that purpose we propose a game theoretic framework that enables us to model various degrees of...

We examine the relation between US stock market returns and the US business cycle for the period 1960-2003 using a new methodology that allows us to estimate a time-varying equity premium. We identify two channels in the transmission mechanism. One is through the mean of stock returns via the...

The typical New-Keynesian small-open-economy model has qualitative features and monetary-policy prescriptions similar to their original closed-economy counterparts - i.e. complete stablization of domestic inflation is sufficient for optimal policy. We consider a version of the model here where...

To help maintain price stability in New Zealand a countercyclical use of the goods and services tax (GST) has been proposed. This paper argues that a variable GST rate is unlikely to be a useful stabilisation tool for monetary policy. It first discusses some of the problems that would arise with...

This paper investigates asymmetric increasing trends in dependence in major international equity markets. To this end, we develop a multiple-regime smooth-transition copula GARCH model and address several important questions, including the number of regimes and the existence of increasing...

This paper compares the output composition of the monetary policy transmission mechanism in Australia to those for the Euro area and the United States. Four Vector Autoregressive (VAR) models are used to estimate the contributions of private consumption and investment to output reactions...

Life-cycle theory predicts ageing exerting long-term macroeconomic impacts through the reduction of private savings. However, empirical research studying macroeconomic determinants of savings generally regard age dependency as the sole measure of ageing, but overlook longevity, which can also...