When people decide about saving and consumption across the various periods of their life time they take into account their life expectancy when comparing present and future needs and resources for satisfying them. The experimental design, applied at two sites (Humboldt-University at Berlin and...

We reexamine the expectations theory of the term structure focusing on the question how monetary policy actions indicated by changes in the very short rate affect long-term interest rates. Our main point is that the expectations hypothesis implies that very long rates should only react to...

A small macroeconomicmodel is constructed starting from a German money demand relation for M3 based on quarterly, seasonally unadjusted data for the period from 1976 to 1996. In contrast to previous studies we build a vector error correction model for M3, GNP, an inflation rate and an interest...

A small macroeconomic model is constructed to study the transmission of the monetary policy conducted by the Deutsche Bundesbank (DBB) since the middle of the 1970s. For this purpose quarterly, seasonally unadjusted data for the period from 1975 to 1998 are used, that is, the period until the...

To assess the predictive content of the interest rate term spread for future economic growth, we distinguish short-run from long-run predictability by using two different approaches. First, following Dufour and Renault (1998) a test procedure is proposed to test for causality at different...

It is argued that standard impulse response analysis based on vector autoregressive models has a number of shortcomings. Although the impulse responses are estimated quantities, measures for sampling variability such as confidence intervals are often not provided. If confidence intervals are...

Experimental studies of risk and time-preference typically focus on one of the two phenomena. The goal of this paper is to investigate the (possible) correlation between subjects' attitude to risk and their time-preference. For this sake we ask 61 subjects to price a simple lottery in 3...

The experimental situation presents a complex stochastic intertemporal allocation problem. First, two initial chance moves select one of three possible termination probabilities which then determines whether "life" lasts 3,4,5, or 6 periods. Compared to Anderhub et al. (1997) participants are...

Recent investigations of the transmission mechanism of German monetary policy arrive at quite different conclusions regarding its stability during the period of monetary targeting by the Bundesbank. In this study small dynamic models for the monetary sector of the German economy are analyzed in...