Controllability of longer-term interest rates requires that the persis-tence of their deviations from the central bank's policy rate (i.e. thepolicy spreads) remains suffciently low. This paper applies fractionalintegration techniques to assess the persistence of policy spreads ofeuro area money...

This paper proposes a novel approach to the combination of conditional covariancematrix forecasts based on the use of the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM). Itis shown how the procedure can be generalized to deal with large dimensional systemsby means of a two-step strategy. The finite sample...