This paper explores two aspects of the conduct of monetary policy under a monetary union. First, even if the preferences of policymakers over inflation and output variability are identical across member countries, differences in economic structure will mean different desired policy responses to...

During the last crisis, developed economies' sovereign Credit Default Swap (hereafter CDS) premia have gained in importance as a tool for approximating credit risk. In this paper, we fit a dynamic factor model to decompose the sovereign CDS spreads of ten OECD economies into three components: a...

This paper analyzes the role of standing facilities in the determination of the demand for reserves in the overnight money market. In particular, we study how the asymmetric nature of the deposit and lending facilities could be used as a powerful policy tool for the simultaneous control of...

The objective of this paper is to examine the predictability of the monetary policy decisions of the Governing Council of the ECB and the transmission of the unexpected component of the monetary policy decisions to the yield curve. We find, using new methodologies, that markets do not fully...

This paper aims at contributing to the understanding of how the ECB conducts monetary policy as seen from a money market perspective. More specifically it covers two different issues. First, it looks at the "learning period" for banks since the Eurosystem started implementing the single monetary...

Markow switching models with time-varying means, variances and mixing weights are applied to charakterize business cycle variation in the probability distribution and higher order moments of stock returns. This allows us to provide a comprehensive characterization of risk that goes well beyond...