Central Bankers are currently facing big challenges in designing and implementing monetary policy, as well as with safeguarding financial stability, with the world economy still in the process of digesting the legacy of the crisis. The crisis has changed central banking in many ways: by shifting...

This paper studies the empirical performance of stochastic volatility models for twenty years of weekly exchange rate data. We concentrate on the effects of the distribution of the exchange rate innovations for parameter estimates and for estimates of the latent volatility series. We approximate...

We study the bond yield conundrum in a macro-finance framework. Building upon a exible and non-structural macro-finance model, we test the hypothesis that the bond yield conundrum is connected to various sources of uncertainty in the financial markets. Moreover we explicitly test for the role of...

Abstract: Central banks in fluence financial markets' expectations of its future policy. By providing its stance on the prospects of the economy, rationalizing past decisions or announcing future actions, central banks affect financial markets' forecasts. In bad times monetary policy...

Abstract: This paper analyzes the voting records of four central banks (Sweden, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic) with spatial models of voting. We infer the policy preferences of the monetary policy committee members and use these to analyze the evolution in preferences over time and the...

Abstract: We analyze revealed policy preferences in monetary policy committees. From the voting records of the Bank of England we estimate the policy preferences with spatial models of voting. We analyze systematic patterns in these policy preferences. We find that internal committee members...

In this paper we estimate ideal points of Bank Presidents and Board Governors at the FOMC. We use stated preferences from FOMC transcripts and estimate a hierarchical spatial voting model. We find a clear difference between the average Board Governor and Bank President. We find little evidence...

European banking regulation has been harmonized to a high degree over the last few decades. Nevertheless, the European banking industry remains fragmented as shown by the relatively high market shares of banks in their home countries. In this paper we concentrate on the integration process of...