We study whether asymmetric macroeconomic shocks help to explain changes in the international comovement of monthly stock returns in major industrialized countries over the period 1975-2004. Based on a time-varying parameter model, we trace out how the pattern of international comovement of...

Globalization may impose a double-burden on low-skilled workers. On the one hand, the relative supply of low-skilled labor increases. This suppresses wages of low-skilled workers and/or increases their unemployment rates. On the other hand, low-skilled workers typically face more limited access...

We study the directional accuracy of South African survey data of short-term and longer-term inflation forecasts. Upon applying techniques developed for the study of relative operating characteristic (ROC) curves, we find evidence that forecasts contain information with respect to the subsequent...

We extend a basic real business cycle model to incorporate households doing sports. Households decide on spending time at the workplace and spending time on doing sports. Sports acts as an investment in health and, thereby, affects total factor productivity. We study the implications of sports...

We use a real-time boosting approach to study the time-varying out-of-sample informational content of various predictor variables (inflation rate, exchange-rate fluctuations, stock market returns and interest rates) for forecasting gold-price fluctuations. While the predictor variables have...