Wages grow and become more unequal as workers age. Economic theory focuses on worker investment in human capital, search for employers, and residual wage shocks to account for these life cycle wage dynamics. We highlight the importance of jobs: collections of tasks and duties defined by...

In this paper, we benchmark an investment actively managed (e.g., fund, portfolio) against a reference portfolio passively managed replicating the investment's cash flows in order to measure the value added by the active investment and decompose it according to the influence of the investment...

Multiple, often competing, characteristic factor models have been proposed to explain the cross-section of stock returns, but with limited economic interpretation of the factors. In this paper, we employ an optimal orthogonalization approach to examine the proportion of explained variation in...

The current environment is characterized by low real rates and by policy rates close to or at their effective lower bound in all major financial areas. We analyze these unusual economic conditions from a secular perspective using data on aggregate consumption, wealth and asset returns. Our...

This paper proposes to measure and to evaluate gender gaps and gender inequalities by means of the decomposition of an inequality measure. A three-terms decomposition of the Gini index is applied, thus allowing to take into account also the role of overlapping between female and male...

I find that corporate European leverage variation between 2007 and 2015 is largely driven by firm and industry characteristics. Conventional, time-varying firm characteristics explain as much leverage variation as country and industry fixed effects combined. Cross-sectional leverage disparities...

We decompose the momentum profits based on total stock returns into three components: a long-term average alpha component that reverses, a stock beta component that accounts for the dynamic market exposure (and momentum crash risk), and a residual return component that drives the momentum effect...

As emerging market investments represent a growing proportion of global portfolios, the effective management of emerging market currency risk becomes more important. Many investors apply some form of currency hedging to manage the foreign exchange exposure inherent in international investments....

From the introduction of the euro up to the 2008 global financial crisis, macroeconomic imbalances widened among Member States. This divergence took the form of strong differences in the dynamics of unit labour costs. This paper asks why this happened. Is it the result of distortionary public...

This paper describes the application of a semiparametric approach, known as a varying coefficients model (Hastie and Tibshirani 1993), to implement a Oaxaca-Blinder type of decomposition in the presence of self-selection into treatment groups for a continuum of comparison groups. The flexibility...