Previous empirical evidence indicates that uncovered interest rate parity (UIP) does not hold for target zone exchange rates, like those in the European Monetary System and in the Nordic countries. We explore a target zone model where the market inferes the probability of a realignment of the...

We document relevant racial differences in the degree consumption insurance against shocks: Blacks appear to be less insured. We probe these results by performing a double/debiased lasso estimation of the treatment effects of a health shock, and we find that such effects are both larger and more...

In this paper, a subsystem of demand equations is estimated using data from the Norwegian survey of household expenditures 1989-1991. One objective has been to obtain substantial knowledge of Norwegian household demand for a set of food groups, with emphasis on price responses, using two...

We employ hourly electricity load data for Switzerland as a real time indicator of the economic effects of the lockdown following the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Our findings reveal that following the drastic lockdown, overall electricity use decreased by 4 per cent, with a reduction of even 11.3 per...

Life expectancy for Blacks is about 8 year shorter than for Whites. A shorter life expectancy, in line with the theoretical prediction of a simple model, determines a much lower amount of savings and wealth accumulation and therefore a lower degree of insurance. This, in turn, contributes to...

Oil price shocks are thought to have played a prominent role in U.S. economic activity. In this paper, we employ Bayesian methods with a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of world economic activity to identify the various sources of oil price shocks and economic fluctuation and to...

With 20 years of PSID data, we document persistent racial differentials in life-cycle consumption dynamics. Starting from similar positions in the consumption distribution Blacks end up in lower percentiles than Whites. Education, income, and wealth are three key drivers of these different...

We use a credible regression discontinuity design to estimate causal education effects. Pupils in the Swiss education system had to pass a centrally organized exam that classified them into different levels of secondary school, and that ultimately determined their educational degree. A major...

This paper analyzes estimators based on the instrumental variable quantile regression (IVQR) model (Chernozhukov and Hansen, 2004, 2005, 2006) under the local quantile treatment effects (LQTE) framework (Abadie et al., 2002). I show that the quantile treatment effect (QTE) estimators in the IVQR...