This paper investigates why the slope of the yield curve predicts future economic activity in Germany and the United States. A structural VAR is used to identify aggregate supply, aggregate demand, monetary policy and inflation scare shocks and to analyse their effects on the real, nominal and...

The work presented in this paper falls into two parts. First, using a simple model and within the context of the central bank’s objective of price stability, it is shown that the optimal monetary response to unexpected changes in asset prices depends on how these changes affect the central...

This paper uses weekly data on short-term eurorates for ten countries for the period 1979–96 to document that the ability of the expectations hypothesis (EH) to account for movements in the term structure is greater, and that short-term interest rates are more predictable, under fixed than...

This paper studies one-, three-, six- and twelve-month Euro-rates for 17 countries using between 10 and 30 years of data. Term spreads contain information about future short-term rates in all 51 regressions that we estimate. Furthermore, in 35 cases we accept the expectations hypothesis. Using...

In this paper we compare the effects of monetary policy on output and prices in the G-7 countries using a parsimonious macroeconometric model comprising output, prices and a short-term interest rate. We identify monetary policy shocks by assuming that they do not affect real output...

An analysis of the performance of GDP, employment and other labor market variables following the troughs in postwar U.S. business cycles points to much slower recoveries in the three most recent episodes, but does not reveal any significant change over time in the relation between GDP and...

Using a Bayesian likelihood approach, we estimate a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model for the US economy using seven macro-economic time series. The model incorporates many types of real and nominal frictions and seven types of structural shocks. We show that this model is able to...

We review the recent literature that studies new, detailed micro data on prices. We discuss implications of the new micro data for macro models. We argue that the new micro data are helpful for macro models, but not decisive. There is no simple mapping from the frequency of price changes in...

During the European exchange market turmoil in 1992-3 it was evident that speculative attacks tended to spread across currencies. Using a two-country version of the model developed by Flood and Garber (1984) we show how a speculative attack against one currency may accelerate the `warranted'...

This Paper estimates a DSGE model with many types of shocks and frictions for both the US and the euro area economy over a common sample period (1974-2002). The structural estimation methodology allows us to investigate whether differences in business cycle behaviour are due to differences in...