In this paper, we review Otmar Issing's career as the ECB's inaugural chief economist and we document many notable successes. We try to infer some general principles that contributed to these successes and draw some lessons. In doing so, we review the evidence using Woodford's (2003) recent...

Intuitively, the observed 'home bias' in individual portfolios plausibly explains the international capital immobility in aggregate data reported by Feldstein and Horioka (1980) as well as the survival of taxes on capital income. These intuitions are examined explicitly in a model where random...

DSGE models are characterized by the presence of expectations as explanatory variables. To use these models for policy evaluation, the econometrician must estimate the parameters of expectation terms. Standard estimation methods have several drawbacks, including possible lack or weakness of...

The origin of the modern publicly-held joint-stock company is typically traced to large-scale maritime trading companies in England and the Netherlands in the early 17th century. Highlighting medieval cases in southern Europe, we claim that the joint-stock company likely emerged in several times...

This paper introduces a novel measure of consumer inflation expectations: We elicit and combine inflation forecasts across categories of personal consumption expenditure to form an aggregated measure of inflation expectations. Drawing on nearly 60,000 respondents, our data comprise the early...

We describe the financing and use of long-term care in the Netherlands. Public long-term care insurance is universal and comprehensive; user fees are low compared to other countries. We use linked survey and administrative data to document the distribution of the need for long-term care in the...

The real economic cost of homeownership depends on an intricate system of taxes and subsides that vary over time and across the United States. We incorporate the key features of this system into a framework for measuring the annual user-cost of housing and we use it to document how housing costs...