Two explanations have been proposed for the observed slowness of wealth decumulation by the elderly in the literature: the precautionary saving induced by (uninsurable) uncertainty about the time of death or by the possibility of major catastrophes in old age that require large outlays; the...

Can the central bank of a monetary union, whose objectives are exclusively defined in terms of union-wide variables, improve its performance by reacting to regional variables rather than to union-wide variables only? Our answer is not clear-cut. We find the improvement to be large when we use a...