A fruitful emerging literature reveals that shocks to uncertainty can explain asset returns, business cycles and financial crises. The literature equates uncertainty shocks with changes in the variance of an innovation whose distribution is common knowledge. But how do such shocks arise? This...

Probably not. First, allowing the probabilities of the states of the economy to differ from their sample frequencies, the Consumption-CAPM is still rejected in both U.S. and international data. Second, the recorded world disasters are too small to rationalize the puzzle unless one assumes that...

Regime switching models can match the tendency of financial markets to often change their behavior abruptly and the phenomenon that the new behavior of financial variables often persists for several periods after such a change. While the regimes captured by regime switching models are identified...

Why were people so unprepared for the global financial crisis, the European debt crisis, and the Fukushima nuclear accident? To address this question, we study a model in which agents make state-contingent plans - think about actions in different contingencies - subject to the constraint that...

Macroeconomic models with financial frictions typically imply that the excess return on a well-diversified portfolio of corporate bonds is close to zero. In contrast, the empirical finance literature documents large and time-varying risk premia in the corporate bond market (the "credit spread...

Is entrepreneurial talent entirely innate or do people learn to become entrepreneurs? We extend Lucas's (1978) model of entrepreneurship to allow for the possibility that entrepreneurial talents may be acquired by watching other entrepreneurs in action. This model implies that areas with a...

We propose to use the attractiveness of pooling relatively short time series that display similar dynamics, but without restricting to pooling all into one group. We suggest estimating the appropriate grouping of time series simultaneously along with the group-specific model parameters. We cast...

This paper aims at assessing the impact of R&D spillovers on firms’ economic performance as measured by productivity growth. The construction of R&D spillovers is based on Jaffe’s methodology (1986, 1988), which associates econometrics and data analysis. The main objective of the paper is to...

This Paper uses NUTS3 sub-regional data for Great Britain to analyse the determinants of spatial variations in income and productivity. We decompose the spatial variation of earnings into a productivity effect and an occupational composition effect. For the former (but not the latter) we find a...