Economic theory often assumes that the opportunity costs of having a child and financial constraints have a simultaneous but opposite influence on fertility. This empirical paper aims to test the concomitance of these effects using the answers to an original survey carried out in 2003 amongst...

In this paper, we develop an overlapping generations model where fertility is endogenous. The utility of the parents is a function of the number of their children, and each child implies two types of fixed costs: the financial cost and the cost in terms of time. A "pay-as-you-go" pension scheme...

This paper proposes a two-regime Bounce-Back Function augmented Self-Exciting Threshold AutoRegression (SETAR) which allows for various shapes of recoveries from the recession regime. It relies on the bounce-back effects first analyzed in a Markov-Switching setup by Kim, Morley and Piger [2005]...

Using median-unbiased estimation based on Augmented-Dickey-Fuller (ADF) regressions, recent research has questioned the validity of Rogoff's "remarkable consensus" of 3-5 year half-lives of deviations from PPP. The confidence intervals of these half-life estimates, however, are extremely wide,...

The debate on the forecasting ability in economics of non-linear models has a long history, and the Great Recession provides us with an opportunity for a re-assessment of the forecasting performance of several classes of non-linear models, widely used in applied macroeconomic research. In this...

We consider the channel consisting in transferring the credit risk associated with refinancing operations between financial institutions to market participants. In particular, we analyze liquidity and volatility premia on the French government debt securities market, since these assets are used...

This paper investigates the predictive accuracy of two alternative forecasting strategies, namely the forecast and information combinations. Theoretically, there should be no role for forecast combinations in a world where information sets can be instantaneously and costlessly combined. However,...

This paper introduces the new Monthly Index of Business Activity (MIBA) model of the Banque de France for forecasting France's GDP. As the previous versions, the model relies exclusively on data from the monthly business survey (EMC) conducted by the Banque de France. However, several major...

This paper merges two specifications developed recently in the forecasting literature: the MS-MIDAS model introduced by Guérin and Marcellino (2011) and the MIDAS-factor model considered in Marcellino and Schumacher (2010). The MS-factor MIDAS model (MS-FaMIDAS) that we introduce incorporates...

This paper explores the existence of a bounce-back effect in inventory investment using the European Commission opinion survey on stocks of finished products in manufacturing and retail trade sectors. The data are quarterly balance for France, Germany and a European aggregate, from 1985q1 to...