Household portfolios include risky bonds, beyond stocks, and respond to permanent labour income shocks. This paper brings these features into a life-cycle setting, and shows that optimal stock investment is constant or increasing in age before retirement for realistic parameter combinations. The...

What are the sources of macroeconomic comovement among G-7 countries? Two main candidate explanations may be singled out: common shocks and common transmission mechanisms. In the paper it is shown that they are complementary, rather than alternative, explanations. By means of a large-scale...

In this paper a new approach to factor vector autoregressive estimation, based on Stock and Watson (2005), is introduced. Relative to the Stock-Watson approach, the proposed method has the advantage of allowing for a more clear-cut interpretation of the global factors, as well as for the...

In this paper international comovements among a set of key real and nominal macroeconomic variables for the G-7 countries have been investigated for the 1980- 2005 period, using a Factor Vector Autoregressive approach. We present evidence that comovements in macroeconomic variables do not...