This paper examines whether policymakers, economists at the Israeli Finance Ministry, act in their personal pension decisions in accordance with the rational behaviour assumptions underlying the pension policies they advance. We find that while economists' decisions regarding three other...

Several developing economies witnessed a large number of systemic financial and currency crises since the 1980s which resulted in severe economic, social, and political problems. The devastating impact of the 1982 and 1994-95 Mexican crises, the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, the 1998 Russian...

This paper proposes a macro-prudential financial soundness analysis that can be used by most developing and transformation countries with or without crisis experience as well as by developed countries with limited data. The objective is to detect economic and financial sector vulnerability,...

Robust decision making implies welfare costs or robustness premia when the approximating model is the true data generating process. To examine the importance of these premia at the aggregate level we employ a simple two-sector dynamic general equilibrium model with human capital and introduce an...

Motivated by the process of economic development in Eastern Germany since the German reunification we set up a dynamic macroeconomic model of a small open economy where both capital and labor are mobile and there are increasing returns to scale at the aggregate level. The model features multiple...

Experimental and behavioral economics are well established branches in the economic science. This essay presents and discusses some results and behavioral regularities from these fields which are of potential importance for public policy. After a brief introduction of what experimental and...

This paper deals with the implications of natural resources for the conduct of economic policies and the role and design of institutions in resource-rich countries. The paper briefly reviews the experience of a few resource-rich countries, highlighting the successes of those that have done well...