In this paper we investigate if there was a causal effect of changes in current and 'permanent' income on the health of East Germans in the years following reunification. Reunification was completely unanticipated and therefore can be seen as a providing some exogenous variation, which resulted...

Over recent years a number of papers have uses individual or household longitudinal survey data to investigate the rationality of income expectations. In this paper we provide a novel contribution to this literature by examining the ability of individuals to correctly predict their own future...

The wealthy hand-to-mouth are households who hold little or no liquid wealth (cash, checking, and savings accounts), despite owning sizable amounts of illiquid assets (assets that carry a transaction cost, such as housing or retirement accounts). We use survey data on household portfolios for...

Drawing on and extending the theory of human capital, a comprehensive life-cycle model of individual earnings is designed. The approach taken permits an isolated analysis of three interconnected levels of aggregation (intra-cohort distribution, overall distribution, and lifetime distribution)...

A wide body of empirical evidence, based on randomized experiments, finds that 20-40 percent of fiscal stimulus payments (e.g. tax rebates) are spent on non-durable household consumption in the quarter that they are received. We develop a structural economic model to interpret this evidence. Our...

This Paper examines changes in the distribution of wages using bounds to allow for the impact of non-random selection into work. We show that bounds constructed without any economic or statistical assumptions can be informative. Since employment rates in the UK are often low they are not...

This paper presents a simple model capturing differences between debt and equity finance to examine how financial structure matters for macroeconomic volatility. Debt finance is relatively cheap in the sense that debt holders need to verify relatively few profitability states, but debt finance...

In this paper, a decomposition method for Tobit-models is derived, which allows the differences in a censored outcome variable between two groups to be decomposed into a part that is explained by differences in observed characteristics and a part attributable to differences in the estimated...

This paper examines the relative savings position of migrant households in West Germany, paying particular attention to differences between temporary and permanent migrants. Utilizing household level data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), our findings reveal significant differences...

This paper assesses the relative efficiency of knowledge production in the OECD using a nonparametric DEA approach. In general, resources allocated to R&D are limited and therefore must be used efficiently, given the institutional and legal constraints. The efficiency scores presented are based...