After the global financial crisis, there is greater awareness of the need to understand the interactions between the financial sector and the real economy and hence the potential for financial instability.  Data from the financial flow of funds, previously relatively neglected, are now seen as...

This paper tests the theoretically founded hypothesis that the surge of SWF establishments is determined by three main factors: 1) the existence of natural resources profits, 2) the government structure and 3) the ability to invest usefully in the domestic economy.  We test this hypothesis on a...

The paper analyses household money demand and consumption. Variables that measure shortage and expectations about its future course are introduced to capture the effects of the transition from centrally planned to market economy. The Johansen procedure is used to identify a system of the two...

Financial liberalisation and innovation (FLIB) in Australia over the 1980s and 1990s provided the institutional backdrop for one of the most rapid increases in household balance sheets and house prices in the world.  An equilibrium correction model of quarterly Australian house prices for...

Evidence from several countries reveals a substantial drop in household consumption around retirement age that some researchers believe is difficult to reconcile with standard life-cycle models.  Using detailed expenditure data from a Spanish panel survey, we find no evidence of a...

A stable, long run consumption equation is estimated for Australia using quarterly data from 1977(2) to 2008(2). The model incorporates non-property income, income expectations, uncertainty, disaggregated household wealth, demography and, importantly, a relaxation in household credit conditions...

The consumption behaviour of UK, US and Japanese households is examined and compared using a modern Ando-Modigliani style consumption function.  The models incorporate income growth expectations, income uncertainty, housing collateral and other credit effects.  These models therefore capture...

This paper complements conventional economic analysis and presents a social norms interpretation to explain cross-country differences in partnership formation rates, and the dramatic decrease in partnership formation rates in Southern Europe in particular. We argue that increases in female human...

This paper characterises the dynamic behaviour of a growing economy where individuals keep up with the Joneses' and face uninsurable labour income risk. Idiosyncratic uncertainty about future labour income reduces the marginal propensity to consume out of financial wealth and raises the...

In this paper we exploit the specific structure of the Euler equation and develop two alternative GMM estimators that deal explicitly with measurement error. The first estimator assumes that the measurement error is lognormally distributed. The second estimator drops the distributional...