Japan's economy is expanding and expected to continue expanding moderately, according to Monthly Report of Recent Economic and Financial Developments released by the Bank of Japan in July 2007.The BOJ declared the change of policy stance at the Monetary Policy Meeting held on July 14, 2006. The...

In times of financial distress, central banks provide unlimited liquidity to avoid fire sales. In response, banks raise their demand for collateral assets, and the short-term scarcity of collateral securities leads to higher prices, the Fire Buy premium. To avoid collateral scarcity, central...

Based on a detailed trade-level dataset, we analyze the proprietary trading behavior of German banks in the months directly preceding and following the Lehman collapse in September 2008. The default of Lehman Brothers was a shock to the German banking system that was both unexpected and...

Mutual fund risk-taking via active portfolio rebalancing varies both in the cross-section and over time. In this paper, I show that the same is true for funds' off- balance sheet risk-taking, even after controlling for on-balance sheet activities. For this purpose, I propose a novel measure of...

This article studies long-horizon dynamic asset allocation strategies with recursive parameter updating. The parameter estimates for the regime-switching dynamics vary as more and more datapoints are observed and the sample size increases. In such a setting, the globally optimal portfolio...

When assessing future growth prospects, does it matter how the economy grows now? In other words, does the current structure of demand affect future growth? This question is analyzed in our paper by using global and EU panel data. The result is quite striking: consumption-led growth - either in...

Simple life cycle and permanent income hypotheses imply that changes in consumption should be unforecastable. Rational forward-looking agents ought to smooth consumption over the life cycle and exhaust the asset stock accumulated during the working career in retirement. Empirical observations...

We construct a simple exchange economy overlapping generations model in which there are along with a public social security various private insurance schemes to explore fertility and the effects of various variables on it. In the private system parents can invest in children and benefit from...

In this paper, the relationship between age and household net worth isexamined. The empirical analysis is based on a time-series of four cross-sections of the Finnish household wealth survey. Two different schemesare employed to identify age, cohort and time effects. Time-of-birth isfound to be...

This paper uses mortgage data to construct a measure of terms on which households access to external finance, and relates it to consumption at both the aggregate and cohort levels. The Household External Finance (HEF) index is based on the spread paid by risky borrowers in the mortgage market....