Although there is much interest in the future retail price of gasoline among consumers, industry analysts, and policymakers, it is widely believed that changes in the price of gasoline are essentially unforecastable given publicly available information. We explore a range of new forecasting...

It has been forty years since the oil crisis of 1973/74. This crisis has been one of the defining economic events of the 1970s and has shaped how many economists think about oil price shocks. In recent years, a large literature on the economic determinants of oil price fluctuations has emerged....

Chen and Zadrozny (1998) developed the linear extended Yule-Walker (XYW) method for determining the parameters of a vector autoregressive (VAR) model with available covariances of mixed-frequency observations on the variables of the model. If the parameters are determined uniquely for available...

As the financial crisis gathered momentum in 2007, the United States Federal Reserve brought its policy interest rate aggressively down from 5 1/4 percent in September 2007 to virtually zero by December 2008. In contrast, although facing the same economic and financial stress, the European...

Traditional least squares estimates of the responsiveness of gasoline consumption to changes in gasoline prices are biased toward zero, given the endogeneity of gasoline prices. A seemingly natural solution to this problem is to instrument for gasoline prices using gasoline taxes, but this...

[Ausgangssituation] Seit geraumer Zeit sind die Auswirkungen des anhaltenden Niedrigzinsumfelds Gegenstand der politischen Diskussion und in der breiteren Öffentlichkeit. Sparer erhalten für ihre Einlagen nahezu keine Nominalverzinsung mehr. Die Verzinsung von deutschen Bundesanleihen kurzer...

We model education as an investment in human capital that, like other investments, is appropriately evaluated in a framework that accounts for risk as well as return. In contrast to dominant wage-premia approach to calculating the returns to education, but which implicitly ignores risk, we...

This chapter outlines the conditions under which accounting-based smoothing can be beneficial for policyholders who hold with-profit or participating payout life annuities (PLAs). We use a realistically-calibrated model of PLAs to explore how alternative accounting techniques influence...

[I. EMU, a Unique Experiment] The European Monetary Union (EMU) represents an unprecedented institutional arrangement. Never before in history have states, while maintaining their individual sovereignties, voluntarily renounced their national currencies in favour of a new common currency and...

As the financial crisis gathered momentum in 2007, the United States Federal Reserve brought its policy interest rate aggressively down from 5 1/4 percent in September 2007 to virtually zero by December 2008. In contrast, although facing the same economic and financial stress, the European...