In recent research age distribution effects on the current account have been found in cross-country panel regressions. The reason is different effects on saving and investment from cohort-size variation. In a panel of annual OECD data 1960-1995, we find that the age effects on saving are similar...

In this paper I investigate to what extent firm-specific uncertainty affects the gain from indexation. Earlier studies have tried to explain wage rigidity by arguing that insiders face little layoff risk due to employment fluctuations caused by aggregate shocks. However, this analysis abstracts...

The potential importance of the precautionary motive for saving has been noted in many studies during the last decades. This paper examines the determination of precautionary saving when people have access to intra-family risk sharing. I show that, with uncertain future income, altruism per se...

We extend the consistency principle for strategic games (Peleg and Tijs (1996)) to apply to solutions which assign to each game a collection of product sets of strategies. Such solutions turn out to satisfy desirable properties that solutions assigning to each game a collection of strategy...

In this paper, we develop an empirical framework for detecting the existence and estimating the magnitude of the softness of a budget constraint. The defining feature of a soft budget constraint is a subordinate organization’s expectations of being bailed out by a superior organization in case...

The purpose of this paper is to estimate constant quality price trends and analysing factors determining market prices for MDCBs (multi-dwelling and commercial buildings) in Sweden. We use high quality data for housing and municipality attributes and our database consists of almost 8500...

We investigate the influence of financial leverage on firms' hiring decisions in the context of a hierarchy of finance model. The analysis is based on the Euler equation of employment in the presence of convex adjustment costs. We show the empirical implications of firms facing a hierarchy of...

We show that empirical results concerning the behavior of floating exchange rates differ between otherwise identical cointegrated and non-cointegrated VAR models. In particular, virtually all ten-year movements in nominal exchange rates are due to fundamental supply and demand shocks when long...

There is a rising importance of human capital in the total capital stock of an economy. In this paper we discuss the nature of investments in children and sketch out the diverse kinds of inputs to the developmental process across different countries at selected time points. The observable inputs...

An often heard view is that exchange rate variability will decrease for a country that joins the EMU. This is not necessarily true. Both real and nominal exchange rate variability increase under certain circumstances when asymmetric demand shocks occur inside or outside the union. These results...