We examine forecast accuracy and efficiency of the Social Security Administration’s projections for cost rate, trust fund balance, trust fund ratio made during 1980-2020 with horizons up to 95 years. We find that the reported deterioration in the accuracy of the forecasts during 2010’s has...

The empirical literature of stock market predictability mainly suffers from model uncertainty and parameter instability. To meet this challenge, we propose a novel approach that combines the documented merits of diffusion indices, regime-switching models, and forecast combination to predict the...

This paper explores price (momentum and contrarian) effects on the days characterised by abnormal returns and the following ones in two commodity markets. Specifically, using daily Gold and Oil price data over the period 01.01.2009-31.03.2020 the following hypotheses are tested: H1) there are...

This paper examines whether there exists a momentum effect after one-day abnormal returns in the cryptocurrency market. For this purpose a number of hypotheses of interest are tested for the BitCoin, Ethereum and LiteCoin exchange rates vis-à-vis the US dollar over the period...

The literature on currency investing that incorporates transaction costs uses costs relevant for small trade sizes. Using the entire order book of the major electronic brokerages for FX, we compute sweep-to-fill costs for trades of different sizes and illustrate the reduction in post-cost...

Rare books of political economy are eminently collectable. Using historical prices, I employ hedonic regressions to estimate financial returns to collecting the works of ten eminent political economists and develop a price index for this corpus of collectables. For the observation period...

Wealthier households obtain higher returns on their investments than poorer ones. How should the tax system account for this return inequality? I study capital taxation in an economy in which return rates endogenously correlate with wealth. The leading example is a financial market, where the...

There is increasing empirical evidence that people systematically differ in their rates of return on capital. We derive optimal non-linear taxes on labor and capital income in the presence of such return heterogeneity. We allow for two distinct reasons why returns are heterogeneous: because...

We have argued that from the standpoint of a policy maker who has access to a number of expert forecasts, the uncertainty of a combined forecast should be interpreted as that of a typical forecaster randomly drawn from the pool. With a standard factor decomposition of a panel of forecasts, we...