This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

Savings are allocated over the acquisition of assets like homes, shares and bonds and government debt paper. For a home acquisition an individual household uses own equity provided by the buyer and outside equity provided by banks. Such outside equity can help to increase the volume of new...

This paper investigates welfare gains and channels of risk sharing among 14 Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries, including the oil-rich Gulf region and the resource-scarce economies such as Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia. The results show that, for the 1992--2009 period, the overall...

Abstract Medical bankruptcy was at the heart of the health care reform debate. According to Himmelstein et al. (2009), 62.1 percent of bankruptcies in the United States in 2007 were due to medical reasons. At the same time over 15 percent of Americans had no health insurance. The 2010 health...

Total factor productivity plays an important role in the growth of the economy. Using recently available state level data over 1993 and 2005, we find widespread regional variation in productivity changes. In the beginning of the liberalization era, improvement in technical efficiency contributes...

In a search and matching model with right-to-manage bargaining, matched workers and firms bargain over wages, given labor demand schedule of firms for hours worked per worker. Wages and hours worked per worker are determined as if they are determined in a competitive labor market with a...

A continuous-time sequential job search model with savings and CARA preferences is solved analytically without resorting to unlimited borrowing and real-valued consumption. I isolate the effects of limited borrowing and nonnegative consumption as well as risk-aversion on the reservation wage by...

The issue of frauds through payment cards has received a great deal of attention from authorities. A large share of card frauds can be ascribed to the phenomenon of counterfeiting of debit cards, widely used payment instrument in “face-to-face” transactions. With the advent of the Single...

Savings accounts are owned by most households, but little is known about the performance of households’ investments. We create a unique dataset by matching information on individual savings accounts from the DNB Household Survey with market data on account-specific interest rates and...

In the quantitative macroeconomics literature, single agent models are widely used to explain ``per-adult equivalent'' data, which are obtained at the household level. In this paper we suggest a simple framework to understand the sources of bias when these models are used to make predictions for...