The purpose of this paper is to reexamine empirically the relationship between long-term interest rates in well integrated financial markets. The analysis focuses on long-term interest rates in the US and Germany and has been carried out within the framework of a five dimensional VAR for the...

A time-varying natural rate of interest is estimated for the euro area using a multivariate unobserved components model. The problem of aggregating interest rate data for the pre-EMU period is directly addressed, and a simple method in order to adjust the risk premia in the interest rate data...

This paper estimates monetary policy shocks for Sweden between 1996-2019. I employ the Romer and Romer (2004) (R&R) approach and use annual forecasts of output growth and inflation to estimate monetary policy shocks. I complement the analysis with shocks from a recursive VAR including output,...

The notion of a natural real rate of interest, due to Wicksell (1936), is widely used in current central bank research. The idea is that there exists a level at which the real interest rate would be compatible with output at its potential level and stationary inflation. Such a consept is of...

The inference for hidden Markov chain models in which the structure is a multiple-equation macroeconomic model raises a number of difficulties that are not as likely to appear in smaller models. One is likely to want to allow for many states in the Markov chain without allowing the number of...

In this paper, we address the issue of spurious correlation in the production of health in a systematic way. Spurious correlation entails the risk of linking health status to medical (and nonmedical) inputs when no links exist. This note first presents the bounds testing procedure as a method to...