Motivated by economic-theory concepts - the Fisher hypothesis and the theory of the term structure - we consider a small set of simple bivariate closed-loop time-series models for the prediction of price inflation and of long- and short-term interest rates. The set includes vector...

This paper shows that the Fed reacts to change in spreads between corporate bond yields and government bond yields over and beyond their information content on future inflation and future activity. This result, obtained in a GMM framework, is confirmed by simulation methods. Moreover, when...

In this paper, we ask whether a small structural model with sticky prices and wages, embedding various modeling devices designed to increase the degree of strategic complementarity between price-setters, can fit postwar US data. To answer this question, we resort to a two-step empirical...

We show how to compute patterns of variation over time, both among and within countries, that determine the international term structure of interest rates, using maximum likelihood within a linear Gaussian state-space framework. The simultaneous estimation of common factors (shared by all...

This paper analyzes the relationship between stock returns and exchange rate changes in international markets and examines how well exchange rate volatility explains movements in stock market returns. The model-based predictions are evaluated on several cost functions. Results from such analysis...

Using data from Germany, Japan, UK, and the U.S., we explore possible threshold cointegration in nominal short- and long-run interest rates with corresponding inflation rates. Traditional cointegration implies perfect mean reversion in real rates and hence confirms the Fisher hypothesis....

The study proposes a multivariate unobserved components model in order to examine relationships at business cycle frequencies among macroeconomic variables. The series are decomposed into non-stationary trends, stationary cycles, and an irregular component. The co-movements among the particular...

The paper investigates the extent to which the dollar/sterling exchange rate fluctuations affect coffee and cocoa futures prices on the London LIFFE and the New York CSCE by means of multivariate GARCH models - under the assumption that traders in perfectly competitive markets have equal access...

Designing an investment strategy in transition economies is a difficult task, because stock markets opened through time, time series are short, and there is little guidance how to obtain expected returns and covariance matrices necessary for mean-variance asset allocation. Moments of market...