Every year during the second and thirdquarters (the hot seasonʺ) housing markets in the UK and the US experience systematic above-trend increases in both prices and transactions. During the fourth and first quarters (the cold seasonʺ), house prices and transactions fall below trend. We propose...

There has been mixed evidence regarding the existence of rational bubbles in the foreign exchange markets. Standard unit root and cointegration tests are criticized for their low power to detect rational bubbles that periodically collapse. This paper introduces recently developed sequential unit...

Using harmonized household survey data, we analyse long run social mobility in the US, the UK, and Germany and test recent theories of multigenerational persistence of socio-economic status. In this country comparison setting we find evidence against Gregory Clark's "universal law of social...

This paper updates and extends Friedman's (1972) evidence on the lag between monetary policy actions and the response of inflation. Our evidence is based on UK and US data for the period 1953 2001 on money growth rates, inflation, and interest rates, as well as annual data on money growth and...