In a globalised world economy, global factors have become increasingly important to explain trade flows at the expense of country-specific determinants. This paper shows empirically the superiority of direct forecasting methods, in which world trade is directly forecasted at the aggregate...

We estimate the degree of ‘stickiness’ in aggregate consumption growth (sometimes interpreted as reflecting consumption habits) for thirteen advanced economies. We find that, after controlling for measurement error, consumption growth has a high degree of auto-correlation, with a stickiness...

We analyze the properties of the natural rate of interest in an economy where nominal debt contracts generate a spread between loan rates and the policy interest rate. In our model, monetary policy has real effects in the flexible-price equilibrium, because it affects the credit spread. Relying...

DSGE-models have become important tools of analysis not only in academia but increasingly in the board rooms of central banks. The success of these models has much to do with the coherence of the intellectual framework it provides. The limitations of these models come from the fact that they...

We propose a refinement of the criterion by Bai and Ng [2002] for determining the number of static factors in factor models with large datasets. It consists in multi-plying the penalty function by a constant which tunes the penalizing power of the function itself as in the Hallin and Liška...

A standard repurchase agreement between two counterparties is considered to examine the endogenous choice of collateral assets, the feasibility of secured lending, and welfare implications of the central bank’s collateral framework. As an important innovation, we allow for two-sided...

This paper proposes a procedure to investigate the nature and persistence of the forces governing the yield curve and to use the extracted information for forecasting purposes. The latent factors of a model of the Nelson-Siegel type are directly linked to the maturity of the yields through the...

This paper studies the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on environmental policy stringency in a two-country model with trade costs, where FDI could be unilateral and bilateral and both governments address local pollution through environmental taxes. We show that FDI does not give rise...

We review, under a historical perspective, the development of the problem of nonfundamentalness of Moving Average (MA) representations of economic models. Nonfundamentalness typically arises when agents’ information space is larger than the econometrician’s one. Therefore it is impossible...