This paper presents an essentially affine model of the term structure of interest rates making use of macroeconomic factors and their long-run expectations. The model extends the approach pioneered by Kozicki and Tinsley (2001) by modelling consistently long-run inflation expectations...

This paper provides an introduction to the mathematical models that describe the shape of the term structure of interest rates across time. In essence, all these so-called term structure models are driven by the assumption that arbitrage opportunities are absent. The intuitive concept of absence...

We provide evidence indicating that countries with well-developed social security systems do not necessarily face a trade-off between social spending and competitiveness. On average, countries that spend a lot on social needs score well in the competitiveness league. We investigate the...

We adapt Brandt's (1999) nonparametric approach to determine the optimal portfolio choice of a risk averse foreign exchange investor who uses moving average trading signals as the information instrument for investment opportunities. Additionally, we assess the economic value of the estimated...

This paper presents an essentially affine model of the term structure of interest rates making use of macroeconomic factors and their long-run expectations. The model extends the approach pioneered by Kozicki and Tinsley (2001) by modelling consistently long-run inflation expectations...

The objective of this paper is to develop and test empirically a new model of imperfect price adjustment. The new model offers two extensions of classical models. First, it allows for a variable proportion of price-setters adjusting their prices at any given period. Second, the duration of...

Absence of arbitrage conditions impose important restrictions on the dynamics of bond and exchange rate returns. It can be shown that the exchange rate serves to convert prices of international undiversifiable risks from one currency to another. Put differently, arbitrage ensures that risk...

This paper uses reprojection to develop a benchmark to assess ECB monetary policy since January 1999, the start of EMU. We first estimate an essentially affine term structure model for the German SWAP yield curve between 1987:04-1998:12. The German monetary policy is then reprojected onto the...

In this paper we estimate and test a multi-factor CIR model for three countries: the USA, Germany and the UK. We find that the estimated model reproduces not only the correlation within each of the bond markets considered but also those observed between markets, suggesting the existence of...

In this paper we assess the effects of monetary unification in Europe on the pricing behavior in financial markets and more in particular on excess returns. We use the standard IAPT framework to analyze the role of the exchange rate in separating excess return pricing accross European countries....