In the aftermath of the financial crisis, it has been argued that a guideline for future policy should be to take the 'a' out of 'asymmetry' in the way monetary policy deals with asset price movements. Recent empirical evidence has suggested that the Federal Reserve may have followed an...

The present paper offers a careful description of empirical identification of possible multiple changes in regime. We apply recently developed tools designed to select between regime-switching models among a broad class of linear and nonlinear regression models and provide a discussion of the...

In this paper we show that empirically plausible results on the effects of fiscal shocks in Galí, López-Salido and Vallés (2007) rely on a high degree of price stickiness and a large percentage of financially constrained agents. Real rigidities in the form of habit persistence, fixed...

This paper discusses a number of issues that are relevant when setting up a credit-scoring model and tests the assumptions used in accounting-based credit-scoring models. A nonstandard comparison of two hazard models with differently specified hazard functions is made: one with a logit...

Ignoring items with large price changes may enhance the informational content of a price index. As an application of the metrically trimmed mean (Kim, 1992) we suggest to discard the individual price changes that deviate the most from the median. Focusing on outliers increases the efficiency...

For empirical purposes it is suggested to approximate the real interest rate gap by a simple transformation of the difference between two nominal interest rates, the central bank's policy rate and the long-term interest rate. The latter contains information on inflationary expectations and...

Empirical evidence documents substantial persistence in the adjustment process to nominal shocks. Existing open-economy models have failed either to generate interesting dynamics or found that the mechanisms are quantitatively weak. We consider the propagation of nominal shocks in a fully...