This paper describes an equilibrium life-cycle model of housing where nonconvex adjustment costs lead households to adjust their housing choice infrequently and by large amounts when they do so. In the cross-sectional dimension, the model matches the wealth distribution; the age profiles of...

This paper estimates private returns to education in Mexico by means of the Mincer model. The natural ability bias that the literature reports in this type of estimations is tried to be solved using the control function method. Through this method some variables relevant to wage determination...

This paper examines whether rising house prices immediately prior to children entering their college years impacts their intergenerational earnings mobility and/or educational outcomes. Higher house prices provide homeowners, especially liquidity constrained ones, with additional funding to...

This paper presents a dynamic model of the decision to pursue a college education in which students face uncertainty about their future income stream after graduation due to unobserved heterogeneity in their innate scholastic ability. After students matriculate and start taking exams, they...

Shiller (2003) and others have argued for the creation of financial instruments that allow households to insure risks associated with their lifetime labor income. In this paper, we argue that while the purpose of such assets is to smooth consumption across states of nature, one must also...

At the beginning of 1999 the euro was launched as a common currency in 11 European countries. This paper addresses empirically the medium to long-term forces driving the real euro-dollar exchange rate. Constructing a synthetic euro-dollar exchange rate over a period from 1975 to 1998 and...

The first part of this paper outlines the concept of democratic accountability of central banks, and compares the legal accountability of the ECB with some other central banks (Bank of Canada, Bank of Japan, Bank of England and the Federal Reserve System). In the second part, we present a theory...

It is widely believed that the Fed controls the funds rate by altering the degree of pressure in the reserve market through open market operations when it changes its target for the federal funds rate. Recently, however, several economists have suggested that open market operations may not be...

The capital-asset-pricing model (CAPM) is one of the most popular methods of financial market analysis. But, evidence of the poor empirical performance of the CAPM has accumulated in the literature. For example, based on their empirical results regarding the relation between market Beta and...

Risk neutral densities (RND) can be used to forecast the price of the underlying basis for the option, or it may be used to price other derivates based on the same sequence. The method adopted in this paper to calculate the RND is to firts estimate daily the diffusion process of the underlying...