We estimate the natural rate of interest for the US and the euro area in a semi-structural model comprising a Taylor rule. Our estimates feature key elements of Laubach and Williams (2003), but are more consistent with using conventional policy rules: we model inflation to be stationary, with...

This paper aims to illustrate how weight matrices that are needed to construct foreign variable vectors in Global Vector Autoregressive (GVAR) models can be estimated jointly with the GVAR's parameters. An application to real GDP and consumption expenditure price inflation as well as a...

This paper proposes mixed-frequency distributed-lag (MFDL) estimators of impulse response functions (IRFs) in a setup where (i) the shock of interest is observed, (ii) the impact variable of interest is observed at a lower frequency (as a temporally aggregated or sequentially sampled variable),...

We propose to treat survey-based density expectations as compositional data when testing either for heterogeneity in density forecasts across different groups of agents or for changes over time. Monte Carlo simulations show that the proposed test has more power relative to both a bootstrap...

This paper studies the role of inflation in the determination of financial asset prices. We estimate an Intertemporal Capital Asset Pricing Model à la Merton (1973), with inflation as an independent source of risk, for France and Germany. Our study also allows us to evaluate how the different...

We use a Bayesian stochastic search variable selection structural VAR model to investigate the heterogeneous impact of housing demand shocks on the macro-economy and the role of house prices in the monetary policy transmission, across euro area countries. A novel set of identification...

This paper presents a simple new method for measuring 'wealth effects' on aggregate consumption. The method exploits the stickiness of consumption growth (sometimes interpreted as reflecting consumption 'habits') to distinguish between immediate and eventual wealth effects. In U.S. data, we...

Based on a Financial Almost Ideal Demand System (FAIDS), this paper investigates the wealth structure of German households. The long-run wealth elasticities and interest rate elasticities were calculated using a unique new quarterly financial accounts macro data set which covers the period from...

Using new micro data on household wealth from fifteen European countries, the Household Finance and Consumption Survey, we first document the substantial cross-country variation in how various measures of wealth are distributed across individual households. Through the lens of a standard,...