Identifying European Monetary Policy Interactions: French and Spanish System with German Variables

This paper develops the "identified VAR" models of France and Spain with German monetary variables to identify monetary policy shocks during the period when the exchange rate is controlled mostly by the ERM. Different identifying assumptions on the contemporaneous policy interactions are experimented. The impulse responses to monetary policy shocks and estimated parameters of monetary reaction function suggest that the identification scheme implying unilateral contemporaneous reaction of non-German monetary policies seem reasonable identifying assumptions in these countries.