According to the Balassa-Samuelson effect, productivity gains in the domestic tradable sector raise the relative price of domestic non-tradables causing deviations from the purchasing power parity. In the literature, the Balassa-Samuelson effect is typically invoked to explain the Penn effect,...

We study how monetary conditions change the supply by banks of mortgage credit to households. We exploit the widespread presence of foreign currency mortgages in Hungary and study this country`s comprehensive credit registry. Changes in monetary conditions not only affect the supply of credit in...

We study the effects and historical contribution of monetary policy shocks to consumption and income inequality in the United States since 1980. Contractionary monetary policy actions systematically increase inequality in labor earnings, total income, consumption and total expenditures....

Krugman (1991)'s target zone model has become the reference of a large part of this literature. Despite its simplicity and elegance, empirical evidence has been lacking. Deriving from Krugman's model analytical expressions for the conditional volatility and density distribution close to the...

Currency carry trade returns are on average large and non-normally distributed. While the literature has found different explanations for the existence of carry trade returns, the higher order moments of their return distribution still pose a puzzle. We propose a new model to explain these...

I study crash risk in currency markets by means of a proxy for global skewness, which measures the aggregate asymmetry of daily changes in spot exchange rates involved in a carry-trade portfolio. I find that this factor is priced in the cross-section of individual currencies. The premium for...

Both educational expenditures and attainment have increased sharply over the last decades, despite rising prices of education, and stagnating income returns to human capital. This paper emphasizes conditional employment risks diversification as additional motivation for education demand. Job...

We show that the difference between the natural rate of interest and the current level of monetary policy stance, which we label Convergence Gap (CG), contains information that is valuable for bond predictability. Adding CG in forecasting regressions of bond excess returns significantly raises...

This chapter surveys recent econometric methodologies for inference in large dimensional conditional factor models in finance. Changes in the business cycle and asset characteristics induce time variation in factor loadings and risk premia to be accounted for. The growing trend in the use of...

This paper deals with identification and inference on the unobservable conditional factor space and its dimension in large unbalanced panels of asset returns. The model specification is nonparametric regarding the way the loadings vary in time as functions of common shocks and individual...