We analyze the political economy of monetary unification among countries with different quality of institutions. Countries with stronger institutions have lower public spending and better investment incentives, even under a stronger currency. Governments under weaker institutions spend more so...

The ratio of consumption to total household wealth (i.e., tangible assets plus unobserved human wealth) is commonly calculated from the estimation of a log-linear version of the household intertemporal budget constraint as a cointegrating relationship between consumption, assets and earnings...

We suggest to extend the stacking procedure for a combination of predictive densities, proposed by Yao, Vehtari, Simpson, and Gelman(2018), to a setting where dynamic learning occurs about features of predictive densities of possibly misspecified models. This improves the averaging process of...

Detecting heterogeneity within a population is crucial in many economic and financial applications. Econometrically, this requires a credible determination of multimodality in a given data distribution. We propose a straightforward yet effective technique for mode inference in discrete data...

Multimodal empirical distributions arise in many fields like Astrophysics, Bioinformatics, Climatology and Economics due to the heterogeneity of the underlying populations. Mixture processes are a popular tool for accurate approximation of such distributions and implied mode detection. Using...

Recessions and expansions are often caused or reinforced by developments in private consumption - the largest component of aggregate demand - which, as a result, varies over the business cycle. As such, an accurate measurement of the cyclical component of consumption and an understanding of its...