This paper examines the role of housing decisions on business cycles fluctuations. We use an overlapping generation model where to acquire a house whose services are an argument in the utility function households have to save for a down payment and make a long term financial committment. Because...

Estimation of Default Probabilities is critical to the correct pricing of credit derivatives and determining the appropriate level of reserves to support credit risky activities (Basel II). Given that credit default swaps (CDS) reflect the market consensus on default probability (with a direct...

This paper incorporates heterogeneous agents into a NNS model with nominal inertia. Heterogeneous households are introduced into NNS models to try and reconcile the movements in interest rates, consumption and inflation. The key findings here are that heterogeneity and wage inertia are needed to...

It has been argued that the Great Inflation of the 1970s has been caused by a Federal Reserve policy that was not aggressive enough in combatting inflation. This led to a scenario where the U.S. economy operated under an indeterminate equilibrium with sunspot shocks becoming a driving force...

It is common in DSGE models that aim to explain the impact of monetary policy on economic variables to identify prices by assuming lump-sum transfers of money. The consequence of this is that the interest rule in these models must be of the Taylor-rule type. In this paper we explore the...

This paper revisits an area of economic research that was very active some years ago and, after a quiet period, is once again becoming active. Adaptive control models consider not only additive uncertainty but also mulitplicative uncertainty in the model parameters as well as measurement error....

This paper introduces a simulation model extending the well known Capital Asset Pricing Model by Sharpe and Lintner. Investors are modeled as multi-period forward looking portfolio optimizers. However, the future is not known \emph{a priori}, but has to be modeled and estimated. We allow agents...

When one constructs long-term investment plan, one needs to consider the fact that long-term bonds are still exposed to inflation risk. This paper studies the intertemporal portfolio-consumption decision where the investment opportunities include "inflation-indexed bonds" -- a modern financial...

We characterise the relationships between preliminary and subsequent measurements for 16 commonly-used UK macroeconomic indicators drawn from two existing real-time data sets and a new nominal variable database. Most preliminary measurements are biased predictors of subsequent measurements, with...

This paper uses real-time data and forecasts provided in historical briefing documents prepared for the Federal Open Market Committee of the United States Federal Reserve to estimate evolving central bank perceptions of the natural rate of unemployment. The briefing documents, informally known...