This paper challenges the widespread view that forward exchange premia contain little information regarding subsequent spot rate movements. Using weekly dollar/Deutschmark and dollar/sterling data, we show that spot and forward exchange rates are well represented by a vector error correction...

Using data from the 1981 Family Expenditure Survey we estimate a logit model for the choice between unemployment and employment, using explanatory variables such as tax and social security benefit rates. Other variables represent the characteristics of the households in the survey and...

This paper examines the validity of the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates by means of a previously unexploited dataset of market expectations that covers a broad range of EMS versus non-EMS foreign currency deposits. Although we find strong evidence in favour of...

The paper is concerned with the empirical modelling of domestic demand for energy in the United Kingdom at the level of the individual household (most previous British work has used aggregate time-series data). The paper develops a two-stage budgeting model of the household's demand for energy...

The booms and busts in U.S. stock prices over the post-war period can to a large extent be explained by fluctuations in investors` subjective capital gains expectations. Survey measures of these expectations display excessive optimism at market peaks and excessive pessimism at market throughs....

Does time-varying business volatility affect the price setting of firms and thus the transmission of monetary policy into the real economy? To address this question, we estimate from the firm-level micro data of the German IFO Business Climate Survey the impact of idiosyncratic volatility on the...

This paper provides an empirical test of the scapegoat theory of exchange rates (Bacchetta and van Wincoop 2004, 2011), as an attempt to evaluate its potential for explaining the poor empirical performance of traditional exchange rate models. This theory suggests that market participants may at...

An affine asset pricing model in which agents have rational but heterogeneous expectations about future asset prices is developed. We estimate the model using data on bond yields and individual survey responses from the Survey of Professional Forecasters and perform a novel three-way...

Firms expect certain investment expenditures. Firms realize certain investment expenditures. The difference is an investment surprise. With the help of the IFO Investment Survey for the German manufacturing sector we measure firms’ (quantitative) investment expectations and firms’...