Despite the single currency, yields on government bonds in the Euro Area deviate from German bond yields. These bond spreads are usually attributed to differing default and liquidity risks. Recent research points out that time-varying global factors, approximated by risk measures or short term...

In this paper we incorporate the term structure of interest rates into a standard inflation forecast targeting framework.Learning about the transmission process of monetary policy is introduced by having heterogeneous agents - ie central bank and private agents - who have different information...

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is in the process of re-inventing itself with bilateral and multilateral surveillance emerging as a key function. The paper analyses how IMF surveillance announcements may be influenced by political power that member countries exert at the IMF. First, we...

In this paper we model the volatility of the spread between the overnight interest rate and the central bank policy rate (the policy spread) for the euro area and the UK during the two main phases of the financial crisis that began in late 2007. During the crisis, the policy spread exhibited...

This note examines the stochastic properties of US term spreads with parametric and semi-parametric fractional integration techniques. Since the observed data (rather than the estimated residuals from a cointegrating regression) are used for the analysis, standard methods can be applied. The...

We present a novel and tractable model of long-term sovereign debt. We make two sets of contributions. First, on the substantive side, using Argentina as a test case we show that unlike one-period debt models, our model of long-term sovereign debt is capable of accounting for the average spread,...

In this paper we incorporate the term structure of interest rates in a standard inflation forecast targeting framework.Learning about the transmission process of monetary policy is introduced by having heterogeneous agents - i.e. the central bank and private agents - who have different...

In this paper we incorporate the term structure of interest rates in a standard inflation forecast targeting framework.We find that under flexible inflation targeting and uncertainty in the degree of persistence in the economy, allowing for active learning possibilities has effects on the...

Weitzman (1998) showed that when future interest rates are uncertain, using the expected net present value implies a term structure of discount rates that is decreasing to the smallest possible interest rate. On the contrary, using the expected net future value criterion implies an increasing...