This paper reviews the usefulness of monetary conditions in the euro area as leading indicators for aggregate demand conditions. Monetary conditions are measured with the MCI concept proposed by the Bank of Canada, and with the yield spread. A central result is that causality runs in both ways...

This paper investigates the determinants of nominal yields of government bonds in the eurozone. The pooled mean group (PMG) technique of cointegration is applied on both monthly and quarterly datasets to examine the major drivers of nominal yields of long-term government bonds in a set of 11...

What is the role of fiscal variables for the assessment of sovereign credit risk? Has this role changed over time? In the face of the financial crisis many OECD countries have experienced large increases of government debt relative to GDP. This has triggered a distinct response of financial...

This study tests for a break in the persistence of EMU government bond yield spreads examining data from France, Italy and Spain and using German interest rates as a kind of benchmark. The results reported here provide evidence for breaks between 2006 and 2008. The persistence of the yield...

Controllability of longer-term interest rates requires that the persistence of their deviations from the central bank's policy rate (i.e. the policy spreads) remains sufficiently low. This paper applies fractional integration techniques to assess the persistence of policy spreads of euro area...

It has been a long debate whether Fed Funds target interest rate (FFTR) has significant explanatory power on interest rates in other countries. In this paper, we analyze the effects of FFTR on Bank of England (BOE) bank rate and European Central Bank (ECB) key interest rate employing - the...

For much of the past two decades, interest rates have fallen in Canada (and elsewhere). At the time of writing, however, with inflation well above the Bank of Canada’s 2 percent target, we are headed in the opposite direction. Where we will land over the long haul is unclear. However, it is...