We employ a Threshold Vector Autoregression (TVAR) methodology in order to examine the nonlinear nature of the interactions among credit market conditions, monetary policy and economic activity. We depart from the existing literature on the subject along two dimensions. First, we focus on a...

This paper examines how foreign portfolio investment (FPI) in the US and its components affect the US macroeconomic conditions. We estimate a Dynamic Factor Model to extract comovements from 31 indicators to obtain three composite measures of the US market conditions, which correspond to real...

This paper studies shock-dependent exchange rate pass-through for Japan with a Bayesian structural vector autoregression model. We identify the shocks by complementing the traditional sign and zero restrictions with narrative sign restrictions related to the Plaza Accord. We find that the...

The concept of the natural or equilibrium rate of interest has attracted a lot of attention from monetary policymakers in recent years. Most attempts to estimate the natural rate use a closed economy framework. We argue that in the face of greater integration of global product and capital...

This paper makes the first attempt to estimate the time-varying natural rate jointly with the output gap and trend potential output growth for the world as a whole using a simple unobserved components model broadly following the methodology developed by Laubach and Williams (2003). We find that...

This paper estimates the natural interest rate for six small open economies (Australia, Canada, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, and the U.K.) with a structural New Keynesian model using Bayesian techniques. Our empirical analysis establishes the following four novel findings. First, we show...