Exploring the period since the inception of the euro, we show that secondary-market yields on Italian public debt increase in anticipation of auctions of new issues and decrease after the auction, while no or a smaller such effect is present for German public debt. However, these yield movements...

See also <I>Proceedings of Banca d' Italia Public Finance Workshop on "Rules and Institutions for Sound Fiscal Policy after the Crisis"</I> (pp. 443-475). Rome: Banca d'Italia.<P> and<P> 'From Budgetary Forecasts to Ex Post Fiscal Data: Exploring the Evolution of Fiscal Forecast Errors in the European Union'...</p></p></i>

Exchange market pressure (EMP) measures the pressure on a currency to depreciate. It adds to the actual depreciation a weighted combination of policy instruments used to ward off depreciation, such as interest rates and foreign exchange interventions, where the weights are their effectiveness....

While virtually all modern models of exchange rate crises recognise that the decision to abandon an exchange rate peg depends on how harshly policy makers are willing to defend the regime, they virtually never model how the exchange rate is defended. In this paper we incorporate both the...

If there is exchange market pressure (EMP), monetary authorities can use the interest rate and official interventions to offset this depreciation tendency, or they can let the exchange rate change. We introduce a new approach to derive how these three variables should be combined to measure EMP....

It is generally believed that for the power of unit root tests, only the time span and not the observation frequency matters. In this paper we show that the observation frequency does matter when the high-frequency data display fat tails and volatility clustering, as is typically the case for...

This discussion paper led to a publication in <A href="http://www.springerlink.com/index/J107501580204223.pdf">'De Economist'</A>, 159(3), 323-360.<p>We investigate numerically how indexation of funded pensions for inflation can be differ-entiated across the various groups of fund participants. The pension arrangement is modelledafter the Dutch situation. While the...</p></a>

This note identifies profit shifting in response to cross-countrydifferences in corporate tax rates as a source of productivitymismeasurement. To quantify the magnitude of mismeasurement, theprofit-shifting effect is isolated from other possible effects ofcorporatetax rates changes on real...

We explore the feasibility of a funded pension system with intergenerational risk sharing when participation in the system is voluntary. Typically, the willingness of the young to participate depends on their belief about the future young's willingness to do so. We characterise equilibria with...

We explore voluntary participation in pension arrangements. Individuals only participate when participation is more attractive than autarky. The bene􀏐it of participation is that risks can be shared with future generations. We apply our analysis to a pay-as-you-go system, a funded system...