We study the social, demographic and economic origins of social security. The data for the U.S. and for a cross section of countries suggest that urbanization and industrialization are associated with the rise of social insurance. We describe an OLG model in which demographics, technology, and...

We evaluate conditional predictive densities for U.S. output growth and inflation using a number of commonly used forecasting models that rely on a large number of macroeconomic predictors. More specifically, we evaluate how well conditional predictive densities based on the commonly used...

The goal of this paper is to develop formal tests to evaluate the relative in-sample performance of two competing, misspecified, non-nested models in the presence of possible data instability. Compared to previous approaches to model selection, which are based on measures of global performance,...

We propose new methods for evaluating predictive densities. The methods include Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Cramer-von Mises-type tests for the correct specification of predictive densities robust to dynamic mis-specification. The novelty is that the tests can detect mis-specification in the...