The European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has created a new economic area, larger and closer with respect to the rest of the world. Area-specific shocks are thus more important in EMU than country-specific shocks used to be in the previous states, e.g. in Germany. It is thus not surprising...

We study the bond yield conundrum in a macro-finance framework. Building upon a flexible and non-structural macro-finance model, we test the hypothesis that the bond yield conundrum is connected to various sources of uncertainty in the financial markets. Moreover we explicitly test for the role...

The long-run price elasticity of demand for credit is a key parameter for intertemporal modeling, policy levers, and lending practice. We use randomized interest rates, offered across 80 regions by Mexico’s largest microlender, to identify a 29-month dollars-borrowed elasticity of -1.9. This...

This paper addresses the issue of forecasting the term structure. We provide a unified state-space modelling framework that encompasses different existing discrete-time yield curve models. Within such framework we analyze the impact on forecasting performance of two crucial modelling choices,...

We show how to model portfolio models in the presence of long bonds. Specifically we study optimal fiscal policy under incomplete markets where the government issues bonds of maturity N 1. Assuming the existence of long bonds introduces an additional intertemporal mechanism that makes taxes...

This paper brings together two strands of the empirical macro literature: the reduced-form evidence that the yield spread helps in forecasting output and the structural evidence on the difficulties of estimating the effect of monetary policy on output in an intertemporal Euler equation. We show...

We use a quantitative model of the US economy to analyse the response of long-term interest rates to monetary policy, and compare the model results with empirical evidence. We find that the model can explain the strong and time-varying yield curve response to monetary policy innovations found in...

A growing literature integrates theories of debt management into models of optimal fiscal policy. One promising theory argues that the composition of government debt should be chosen so that fluctuations in the market value of debt offset changes in expected future deficits. This complete market...

Historical estimates of the Fisher effect and the informational content in the yield curve may not be relevant after a change in monetary policy. This paper uses a small dynamic rational expectations model with staggered price setting to study how central bank preferences (and thereby monetary...

The European Central Bank has assigned a special role to money in its two pillar strategy and has received much criticism for this decision. The case against including money in the central bank's interest rate rule is based on a standard model of the monetary transmission process that underlies...