Helmut Lütkepohl

Previous euro area money demand studies have used aggregated national time series data from the countries participating in the European Monetary Union (EMU). However, aggregation may be problematic because macroeconomic convergence processes have taken place in the countries of interest. Therefore, in this study, quarterly German data until 1998 are combined with data from the euro area from 1999 until 2002 and these series are used for fitting a small vector error correction model for the monetary sector of the EMU. A stable long‐run money demand relation is found for the full sample period. Moreover, impulse responses do not change much when the sample period is extended by the EMU period provided the break in the extended data series is captured by a simple dummy variable. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We give a brief introduction to the vector autoregressive model for cointegrated I(2) variables and show how some plausible economic relations can be formulated in the I(2) framework in such a way that likelihood ratio tests for their validity are asymptotically χ2 distributed.The authors thank Paolo Paruolo for helpful comments and the ESF for financial support in the framework of the EMM network.

Two types of unit root tests which accommodate a structural level shift at a known point in time are extended to the situation where the break date is unknown. It is shown that for any estimator for the break date the tests have the same asymptotic distribution as the corresponding tests under the known break date assumption. Different estimators of the break date are compared in a Monte Carlo experiment and a recommendation for choosing the break date in small samples is given. Example series from the Nelson–Plosser data set are used to illustrate the performance of our tests.

A small macroeconomic model is constructed to study the transmission of the monetary policy conducted by the Deutsche Bundesbank (DBB) since the middle of the 1970s. For this purpose, quarterly, seasonally unadjusted data for the period from 1975 to 1998 are used; that is, the period until the introduction of the Euro is considered. A vector error correction model is constructed for the German monetary sector based on M3, GNP, an inflation rate, a long-term interest rate, and a short-term rate that represents the policy variable of the DBB. Moreover, import price inflation is included as an exogenous variable to capture foreign effects. An impulse response analysis highlights the effects of changes in the short-term interest rate and shows the interaction of the main variables of the monetary sector.We thank Alexander Benkwitz for helping with the computations and Massimiliano Marcellino, Paulo Rodrigues, Phillipe Andrade, Harald Uhlig, Adrian Pagan, and two anonymous referees for comments. Financial support was provided by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Sonderforschungsbereich 373, and the European Commission under the Training and Mobility of Researchers Programme (contract No. ERBFMRXCT980213). The paper was presented at the EEA meeting and the ESEM in Venice in 2002.

Tests for the cointegrating rank of a vector autoregressive process are considered that allow for possible exogenous shifts in the mean of the data-generation p...