The Employees’ Provident Fund (EPF) of Sri Lanka is a defined-contribution pension fund whose pooled asset holdings consist mainly of local government bonds. Regulations prohibit international diversification, and this paper aims to quantify the extent of the potential harms, if any, caused by...

Understanding the money demand function is highly important for monetary policy implementation, especially in a monetary targeting framework. The paper uses cointegration analysis and a reduced-form short-run error correction model to investigate the demand for money in Vietnam between 1999 and...

We consider the portfolio selection problem in the accumulation phase of a defined contribution (DC) pension scheme. We solve the mean-variance portfolio selection problem using the embedding technique pioneered by Zhou and Li (2000) and show that it is equivalent to a target-based optimization...

We consider a continuous-time neoclassical one-sector stochastic growth model of Ramsey-type with CRRA utility and Cobb-Douglas technology, where each of the following components are exposed to exogeneous uncertainties (shocks): capital stock K, effectiveness of labor A, and labor force L; the...

We study users' response to sponsored-search advertising using data from Microsoft's Live AdCenter distributed in the "Beyond Search" initiative. We estimate a structural model of utility maximizing users, which quantifies "user experience" based on their "revealed preferences," and predicts...

A deferred annuity typically includes an option-like right for the policyholder. At the end of the deferment period, he may either choose to receive annuity payouts, calculated based on a mortality table agreed to at contract inception, or receive the accumulated capital as a lump sum....

Random Utility Models of recreation demand are widely used to relate demand and value to the characteristics of recreation sites. Although some kinds of endogeneity problems have been studied in previous literature, no study has addressed the potential problem with site characteristics that are...

Judicial discretion has rightly been termed a puzzle. Given the several competing concerns that can influence judges when they sanction offenders and the institutional structures that typically constrain their decisions, the task of uncovering the motivational structures underlying judicial...