In 2001, the Fed has lowered interest rates in a series of cuts, starting from 6.5 % at the end of 2000 to 2.0 % by early November. This paper asks, whether the Federal Reserve Bank has been surprising the markets, taking as given the conventional view about the effect of monetary policy shocks....

Introducing the approach by Masanao Aoki (1981) to time series econometrics, we show that the dynamics of symmetric linear possibly cointegrated two-country VAR models can be separated into two autonomous subsystems: the country averages and country differences, where the latter includes the...

Concerns about the magnitude and length of exchange rate pass-through to consumer prices have increased in many developing countries in view of its profound implications on price and exchange rate stability as well as the macroeconomic policy environment. This paper examines the exchange rate...

This paper investigates which shocks drive asynchrony of business cycles in the euro area. Thereby, it unites two strands of literature, those on common features and on structural VAR analysis. In particular, we show that the presence of a common cycle implies collinearity of structural impulse...

This paper investigates within a SVAR framework the effects of anticipated monetary policy in the euro area. Building on a procedure recently proposed by Cochrane yielding the response of output to an anticipated monetary policy impulse, we show that in the past twenty years anticipated monetary...