This paper compares impulse responses to monetary policy shocks in the euro area countries before the EMU and in the New Member States (NMS) from central-eastern Europe. We mitigate the small sample problem, which is especially acute for the NMS, by using a Bayesian estimation that combines...

The news about the economy contained in a central bank announcement can affect public expectations. This paper shows, using both event studies and vector autoregressions, that such central bank information effects are an important channel of the transatlantic spillover of monetary policy. They...

We propose a benchmark prior for the estimation of vector autoregressions: a prior about initial growth rates of the modeled series. We first show that the Bayesian vs frequentist small sample bias controversy is driven by different default initial conditions. These initial conditions are...

In the immediate wake of the Great Recession we didn't see the disinflation that most models predicted and, subsequently, we didn't see the inflation they predicted. We show that these puzzles disappear in a Vector Autoregressive model that properly accounts for domestic and global factors. Such...

This paper examines which measures of financial conditions are informative about the tail risks to output growth in the euro area. The Composite Indicator of Systemic Stress (CISS) is more informative than indicators focusing on narrower segments of financial markets or their simple aggregation...

This paper estimates and compares the international transmission of European Central Bank (ECB) and Federal Reserve System monetary policy in a unified and methodologically consistent framework. It identifies pure monetary policy shocks by purging them of the bias stemming from contemporaneous...

Central bank announcements simultaneously convey information about monetary policy and the central bank's assessment of the economic outlook. This paper disentangles these two components and studies their effect on the economy using a structural vector autoregression. It relies on the...

Fed's monetary policy announcements convey a mix of news about different kinds of conventional and unconventional policies and about the economy. Financial market responses to these announcements are very leptokurtic: often tiny, but sometimes large. I estimate the underlying structural shocks...

We estimate spillovers from US monetary policy for different measures in the Federal Reserve's toolkit. We make use of novel measures of exogenous variation in conventional rate policy, forward guidance and large-scale asset purchases (LSAPs) based on high-frequency asset-price surprises around...