We present a new way to model age-specific demographic variables with the example of age-specific mortality in the U.S., building on the Lee-Carter approach and extendingit in several dimensions. We incorporate covariates and model their dynamics jointly with the latent variables underlying...

This paper discusses the paper "The Source of Historical Economic Fluctuations: An Analysis using Long-Run Restrictions" by Neville Francis and Valerie A. Ramey. It argues that these authors have made great progress both in the precise measurement of labor input as well as determining the effect...

We propose a stochastic control approach to the dynamic maximization ofrobust utility functionals that are defined in terms of logarithmic utility and a dynamically consistent convex risk measure. The underlying market is modeled by a diffusion process whose coefficients are driven by an...

As a main step in the numerical solution of control problems in continuous time,the controlled process is approximated by sequences of controlled Markov chains, thus discretising time and space. A new feature in this context is to allow for delay in the dynamics. The existence of an optimal...

The subject of the present paper is a simplified model for a symmetric bistable system with memory or delay, the reference model, which in the presence of noise exhibits a phenomenon similar to what is known as stochastic resonance. The reference model is given by a one dimensional parametrized...

We present an explicit solution to an optimal stopping problem in a model described by a stochastic delay differential equation with an exponential delay measure. The method of proof is based on reducing the initial problem to a free-boundary problem and solving the latter by means of the...

Using two data sets derived from German administrative data, including a linkedemployer-employee data set, we investigate the cyclicality of worker and job flows.The analysis stresses the importance of two-sided labour market heterogeneity inthis context, taking into account both observed and...

Empirical observations show that education helps to protect against labor market risks. This is twofold: The higher educated face a higher expected wage income and a lower probability of being unemployed. Although this relationship has been analyzed in the literature broadly, several...

A large body of literature explains the inferior position of unskilled workersby imposing a structural shift in the labor force skill composition. This papertakes a different approach by emphasizing the connection between cyclicalvariations in skilled and unskilled labor markets. Using a...

I explore the implications of the lumpy labor adjustment as a propagation mechanism for aggregate dynamics. The model I use nests the basic RBC model with a staggeredjob-turnover in the spirit of Taylor (1980) and Calvo (1983). It extends this approach by introducing a Weibull-distributed labor...