Elderly women are much more likely to be poor than the elderly men. In 1992, 15.7 percent of elderly females, those over age 65, were in poverty, in contrast to 8.9 percent of elderly males. A nonmarried women who is on the verge of retirement has about 20 percent less wealth than a nonmarried...

Lucas (1976) pointed out, that when optimization is performed on a deterministic macro model, the resulting policy may not reflect the true optimal solution. Private agents may react to announced policies and consequently model parameters will start to drift. The aim of this paper is to develop...

We analyse the determinants of banking crises in a large panel of developing and developed countries observed over the 1980-1995 period using a multiperiod probit model. The model allows for random effects and serial correlation in the unobservables and thus is intractable using standard...

In recent literature on multiple structural change, the number of breaks is determined through a sequential test of parameter constancy. This paper explores the possibility of determining the number of breaks in a time series by relating structural breaks to the behavior of unit roots. Thus,...

The model we discuss in this note is a re-examination of the classical Bertrand model of imperfect competition. The main difference is that consumers are allowed to have some strategic behavior when deciding from which one of the two sellers they will buy.Two sellers offering the same...

In this paper, we propose to use the Monte-Carlo (MC) test technique to obtain valid p-values when investigating the presence of discontinuities in jump-diffusion models. Indeed, the LR statistic used to test for discontinuities has typically a complex non-standard distribution, for at least two...

Economic research of the last decade linking macroeconomic fundamentals to asset prices has revealed evidence that standard intertemporal asset pricing theory is not successful in explaining (unconditional) first moments of asset market characteristics such as the risk free intrest rate, stock...

This paper studies the effects of house price risk on the optimal asset and consumption choices of a finitely lived investor who derives utility from the consumption of both housing and other goods. Frictions considered in the model include transaction costs of selling a house, uninsurable labor...

Economic evolution is said to occur when economic structures change. That is, when the institutional and/or technological rules of a society are replaced by new ones. As with evolutionary phenomena in other fields it is rather impossible to predict such a change. The reason is that economic...

In this application of an overlapping generations model the effects of a pay-as-you-go retirement scheme on the optimal savings rate, magnitude and stability of the equilibrium capital per capita level are established through the assumptions of explicit, well-behaved utility and production...