This paper explores the interaction between retirement flexibility and portfolio choice in an overlapping-generations model of a closed economy. Retirement flexibility is often seen as a hedge against capital market risks which justifies more risky asset portfolios. We show, however, that this...

Premiums and benefits associated with traditional life insurance contracts are usually specified as fixed amounts in policy conditions. However, reserve-dependent surrender values and reserve-dependent expenses are common in insurance practice. The famous Cantelli theorem in life insurance...

Counterparty default risk might hamper trade and trigger a financial crisis. The introduction of a central clearing counterparty (CCP) benefits trading but pushes systemic risk into CCP default. Standard risk management strategies at CCPs currently overlook a risk associated with crowded trades....

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the <A href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0351.2011.00425.x/abstract;jsessionid=F64011DF99B22B6E2BF33FDA1C47DE9C.f04t03">'Economics of Transition'</A>, 2011, 19(4), 639-666.<P> Whether fiscal policy is sustainable depends on a government's future revenue and expenditure streams, both of which are highly uncertain. In commodity-rich countries, this problem is...</p></a>

This discussion paper led to a publication in the <A HREF="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268109000109">'Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization'</A>, 2009, 70(1-2), 374-388.<P> In this paper we analyze a large sample of individual responses to six lottery questions. Wederive a simultaneous estimate of risk aversion γ and the time preference discount...</p></a>

This paper assesses the transmission of fiscal policy shocks in a New Keynesian framework where government expenditures contribute to aggregate production. It is shown that even if the impact of government expenditures on production is small, this assumption helps to reconcile the models'...

Micro data are used for the US over the period 1968 - 1992 to estimate time-varying specifications for the conditional variance of earnings of individual households. Specifications estimated are standard and quadratic ARCH and GARCH processes. The cross-sectional mean of the estimated...

This discussion paper resulted in an article in the <I>Journal of Macroeconomics</I> (2010). Volume 32(1), 169-184.<P> We investigate the importance of aggregate and consumer-specific or idiosyncratic labour income risk for aggregate consumption changes in the US over the period 1952-2001. Theoretically,...</p></i>

The use of various moving average (MA) rules remains popular with financial market practitioners. These rules have recently become the focus of a number empirical studies, but there have been very few studies of financial market models where some agents employ technical trading rules of the type...

Since the beginnings of the eighties house prices in the Netherlands haveincreased steadily and considerably. In this paper we study the effect of this developmenton the demand for second mortgages and on the savings of Dutch households. We use the dataof the Dutch socio-economic panel for the...