What explains international interest rate co-movement?

Abstract

The international co-movement of interest rates reflects correlated business-cycle fluctuations, largely driven by demand shocks. Monetary policy in advanced economies follows domestic mandates – inflation and the output gap – and does not respond to foreign policy shocks. We derive this result from a Bayesian structural panel vector autoregression with informative priors, homogeneity restrictions on contemporaneous relations, a hierarchical Minnesota prior with cross-sectional shrinkage, and a factor structure for structural shocks.