We decompose capital flows--both debt and equity--into public and private components and study their relationship with productivity growth. This exercise reveals that international capital flows are mainly shaped by government decisions and sovereign to sovereign transactions. Specifically, we...

A macro-prudential policy maker can manage risks to financial stability only if currentand future risks can be reliably assessed. We propose a novel framework to assessfinancial system risk. Using a dynamic factor framework based on state-space methods, we model latent macro-financial and credit...

Proponents of the so-called New Economy claim that it entails a structural change of the economy. Such a change, in turn, would require the central bank to rethink its monetary policy to the extent that traditional relationships between inf1ation and economic growth are no longer valid. But such...

Federal Reserve nonborrowed reserve supply systematically responded to changes in inflation and in the output gap over the period 1969-2000. While the feedback from output gap is always negative, the response of money supply to changes in inflation varies considerably across time. Nonborrowed...

This paper examines monetary policy implementation in a sticky price model. The central bank's plan under discretionary optimization is entirely forward-looking and exhibits multiple equilibrium solutions if transactions frictions are not negligibly small. The central bank can then implement...

We empirically analyze the language proficiency of migrants in the Netherlands. Traditionally, the emphasis in studying language proficiency and economic outcomes has been on the relation between earnings and indicators for language proficiency, motivated by the human capital theory. Here we...

We determine the magnitude and nature of systematic default risk using 1971{2009) default data from Moody's. We disentangle systematic risk factors due to business cycle effects, common default dynamics (frailty), and industry-specific dynamics (including contagion). To quantify the contribution...

We propose procedures for estimating the time-dependent transition matrices for the general class of finite nonhomogeneous continuous-time semi-Markov processes. We prove the existence and uniqueness of solutions for the system of Volterra integral equations defining the transition matrices,...

This discussion paper has led to a publication in <A href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001429211200044X">'European Economic Review'</A>, 56(4), 669-90.<P>We investigate the presence of moral hazard and advantageous or adverse selection in a market for supplementary health insurance. For this we specify and estimate dynamic models for health insurance...</p></a>

We analyze the illicit drug usage by inhabitants and visitors of European cities. Our statistical analyses are by means of linear mixed models. The data on illicit drug usage of cocaine, ecstasy, amphetamines, methamphetamines, and cannabis are collected through wastewater samples from the inlet...