A large empirical literature has examined the transmission mechanism of structural shocks in great detail. The possible role played by changes in the volatility of shocks has largely been overlooked in vector autoregression based applications. This paper proposes an extended vector autoregression where the volatility of structural shocks is allowed to be time-varying and to have a direct impact...

An exciting development in empirical macroeconometrics is the increasing use of external sources of as-if randomness to identify the dynamic causal effects of macroeconomic shocks. This approach – the use of external instruments – is the time series counterpart of the highly successful strategy in microeconometrics of using external as-if randomness to provide instruments that identify causal e...

This paper explores the relationship between the health of the financial sector and the rest of the economy. We develop an indicator of financial sector health using a distance-to-default measure based on a Merton-style option pricing model. Our measure spans over three decades and appears to capture periods when financial sector institutions were strong and when they were weak. We then use vec...

This paper studies the business cycle in Germany using the HP-filter (Hodrick/Prescott (1997)) to isolate the cyclical component. A two-country International Business Cycle model in line with Baxter/Crucini (1995) is built to explain these facts. The combination of GHH-preferences with taste shocks resulting from government consumption is shown to be an important feature of the German business ...

This paper examines the effect of the volatility of oil prices on food price in South Africa using monthly data covering the period 2002:01 to 2014:09. Food price is measured by the South African consumer price index for food while oil price is proxied by the Brent crude oil. The study employs the GARCH-in-mean VAR model, which allows the investigation of the effect of a negative and positive s...

This paper proposes a structural VAR model which extends the frameworks of Hoffmaister and Roldós (2001) and Prasad (1999). The model is then used to analyse the sources of China’s trade balance fluctuations in the period of 1985–2000. Efforts are made to distinguish the forces which underlie the long-run trend in trade balance from those with transitory impacts. The effects of four types of sh...

This study investigates whether or not UK industrial production is characterised by a nonlinear response to monetary shocks. Our methodology is based on logistic smooth transition vector autoregression modelling where we employ monthly data for the period January 1960 to August 1999. We find evidence of small, though nonetheless significant nonlinearities. Furthermore, we find support for a ran...

Shocks to bank lending, risk-taking and securitization activities that are orthogonal to real economy and monetary policy innovations account for more than 30 percent of U.S. output variation. The dynamic effects, however, depend on the type of shock. Expansionary securitization shocks lead to a permanent rise in real GDP and a fall in inflation. Bank lending and risk-taking shocks, in contrast...

In this paper, using the co-integrated VAR model we attempt to empirically investigate the effects of oil price and monetary shocks on the Russian economy covering the period 1995:Q3-2007:Q4. Our finding is that real GDP and inflation in Russia exhibit a positive response to an oil price increase, but not in the case of interest rates. Also we see that the impact of the oil price shock on the e...

Over the course of U.S. history there have been a number of occasions in which aggregate nominal spending has declined, the most recent of which occurred during the recession that began in December 2007. Coincident with these observed declines in nominal spending is a corresponding decline in the quantity of transaction assets and real output, where the former are defined as financial assets th...