There is no consensus about the causes of the reduction in business cycle volatility seen in many major economies over the last decade. Using stylised models of the economies of the US, Euro area, UK and Japan, we argue that economic stability has been fostered by improved monetary policy and by...

The net present value of costs and benefits from a pay-as-you-go social security system are negative for young people and positive for the elderly. If people all vote their financial selfinterest, there will be a pivotal age such that those who are younger favor smaller social security benefits...

This paper argues that skill formation is a life-cycle process and develops the implications of this insight for Scottish social policy. Families are major producers of skills, and a successful policy needs to promote effective families and to supplement failing ones. Targeted early...

In this paper we investigate the effects of central bank interventions (CBI) in a noise trading model with chartists and fundamentalists. We first estimate a model in which chartists extrapolate past returns and fundamentalists forecast a mean reverting dynamics of the exchange rate towards a...

This paper presents a global model linking individual country vector error-correcting models in which the domestic variables are related to the country-specific variables as an approximate solution to a global common factor model. This global VAR is estimated for 26 countries, the euro area...

This paper examines mean and volatility spillovers between four green municipal bonds issued by the US states of California, Colorado, Columbia and Ohio, and the role played by the recent Covid-19 pandemic and the COP policy announcements respectively. Specifically, four-variate VAR-GARCH-BEKK...

This paper analyses US nominal house prices at an annual frequency over the period from 1927 to 2022 by means of a very general time series model. This includes both a (linear and non-linear) deterministic and a stochastic component, with the latter allowing for fractional orders of integration...

This paper proposes a structural econometric approach to estimating the basic reproduction number (R0) of Covid-19. This approach identifies R0 in a panel regression model by filtering out the effects of mitigating factors on disease diffusion and is easy to implement. We apply the method to...

Fiscal policy has become quite controversial in the post-Keynesian era, the debate over the Obama stimulus package being a contentious recent example. Some pundits go so far as to take the position that macroeconomic theory has failed to meaningfully progress in terms of providing useful...

This paper proposes an explanation of the shifts in the volatility of exchange rate returns that relies on standard present value exchange rate models. Agents are uncertain about the true data generating model and deal with the model uncertainty by making inference on the models and their...