This paper compares responses to monetary shocks in the EMU countries (in the pre-EMU sample) and in the New Member States (NMS) from Central Europe. The small-sample problem, especially acute for the NMS, is mitigated by using a Bayesian estimation procedure which combines information across...

Many factors inhibiting and facilitating economic growth have been suggested. Will international income data tell which matter when all are treated symmetrically a priori? We find that growth determinants emerging from agnostic Bayesian model averaging and classical model selection procedures...

This paper estimates a Bayesian VAR for the US economy which includes a housing sector and addresses the following questions. Can developments in the housing sector be explained on the basis of developments in real and nominal GDP and interest rates? What are the effects of housing demand shocks...

We propose a benchmark prior for the estimation of vector autoregressions: a prior about initial growth rates of the modeled series. We first show that the Bayesian vs frequentist small sample bias controversy is driven by different default initial conditions. These initial conditions are...

A researcher is interested in a set of variables that he wants to model with a vector auto-regression and he has a dataset with more variables. Which variables from the dataset to include in the VAR, in addition to the variables of interest? This question arises in many applications of VARs, in...

After 2012, inflation has been unexpectedly low across much of the developed world and economists speak of a “missing inflation” puzzle, namely inflation was expected to be higher on the back of an ongoing recovery. This paper investigates the causes and consequences of low inflation in the...

In the immediate wake of the Great Recession we didn't see the disinflation that most models predicted and, subsequently, we didn't see the inflation they predicted. We show that these puzzles disappear in a Vector Autoregressive model that properly accounts for domestic and global factors. Such...

The euro area has been experiencing a prolonged period of weak economic activity and very low inflation. This paper reviews models of business cycle stabilization with an eye to formulating lessons for policy in the euro area. According to standard models, after a large recessionary shock...

This paper estimates responses to monetary shocks for several of the current members of the EMU (in the pre-EMU sample) and for the Central and East European (CEE) countries, along with the mean response in each of the groups. The problem of the short sample, especially acute in the case of the...

When monetary and fiscal policy are conducted as in the euro area, output, inflation, and government bond default premia are indeterminate according to a standard general equilibrium model with sticky prices extended to include defaultable public debt. With sunspots, the model mimics the recent...