What problem the Fed and other central banks are solving by printing money and letting interest rates fall to zero is the focus of this paper. This activity does not appear to affect nominal GDP or inflation prior to COVID, and yet central bank liabilities have continued to rise. This suggests...

These notes are based on parts of a keynote address to the Fourth Annual Conference on Money and Finance at Chapman University on 6-7 September 2019. Quantitative easing (QE) policies have been pushed to extremes and extended well beyond their use-by dates to little plausible effect in achieving...

The fi nancial crisis has exposed all EU Member States - to different degrees - with a double economic policy challenge: to foster sustainable economic growth and to consolidate public finances. Can the governments in the EU afford to forego the benefi ts of targeted tax measures at EU level -...

This paper presents a simple model of state-dependent pricing that allows identifying the relative importance of both nominal and real factors in price rigidity. Using two rich datasets consisting of a large fraction of the price quotes used to compute the Belgian and French Consumer Price...

This paper presents a quarterly global model linking individual country vector errorcorrecting models in which the domestic variables are related to the country-specific foreign variables. The global VAR (GVAR) model is estimated for 26 countries, the euro area being treated as a single economy,...

This paper focuses on testing long run macroeconomic relations for interest rates, equity, prices and exchange rates suggested by arbitrage in financial and goods markets. It uses the global vector autoregressive (GVAR) model to test for long run restrictions in each country/region conditioning...

Academic macroeconomics and the research department of central banks have come to be dominated by Dynamic, Stochastic, General Equilibrium (DSGE) models based on micro-foundations of optimising representative agents with rational expectations. We argue that the dominance of this particular sort...

In recent years there has been increasing concern about the identification of parameters in dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. Given the structure of DSGE models it may be difficult to determine whether a parameter is identified. For the researcher using Bayesian methods, a...

An important issue in the analysis of cross-sectional dependence which has received renewed interest in the past few years is the need for a better understanding of the extent and nature of such cross dependencies. In this paper we focus on measures of cross-sectional dependence and how such...

This paper is concerned with testing the time series implications of the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) due to Sharpe (1964) and Lintner (1965), when the number of securities, N, is large relative to the time dimension, T, of the return series. In the case of cross-sectionally correlated...