The empirical literature is inconclusive about whether a country’s democratization has a long-lasting impact on former supporters or opponents of the bygone regime. With newly available individual-level data of former residents of the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR), we analyze how...

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) provide opportunities for a more flexible and market-based provision of public services. At the same time, they may impair fiscal transparency and offer politicians discretion in the presence of strict fiscal rules if these only constrain the core udget. Using a...

This paper proposes a Skewed Stochastic Volatility (SSV) model to model time varying, asymmetric forecast distributions to estimate Growth at Risk as introduced in Adrian, Boyarchenko, and Giannone's (2019) seminal paper "Vulnerable Growth". In contrary to their semi-parametric approach, the SSV...

We study the statistical properties of heterogeneous agent models. Using aBewley-Hugget-Aiyagari model we compute the density function of wealth and in-come and use it for likelihood inference. We study the finite sample properties of themaximum likelihood estimator (MLE) using Monte Carlo...

Experimenters have to make theoretically irrelevant decisions concerning user interfaces and ordering or labeling of options. Such presentation decisions affect behavior and cause results to appear contradictory across experiments, obstructing utility estimation and policy recommendations. The...

This study analyses the situation of the Brazilian population vis-à-vis the Social Security System (SSS) using data from PNAD. We chose the 1982, 1992 and 2002 PNAD data to give a series of pictures of the Brazilian population at equal intervals but under different legal instances with respect...

Measuring economic uncertainty is crucial for understanding investment decisions by individuals and firms. Macroeconomists increasingly rely on survey data on subjective expectations. An innovative approach to measure aggregate uncertainty exploits the rounding patterns in individuals' responses...

We show that one should not use the one-sided Hodrick-Prescott filter (HP-1s) as the real-time version of the two-sided Hodrick-Prescott filter (HP-2s): First, in terms of the extracted cyclical component, HP-1s fails to remove low-frequency fluctuations to the same extent as HP-2s. Second,...

The Basel III framework advises considering a reference indicator at the country level to guide the setting of the countercyclical capital buffer: the credit-to-GDP gap. In this paper, I provide empirical evidence suggesting that the credit-to-GDP gap is subject to spurious medium-term cycles,...

Hamilton (2017) criticises the Hodrick and Prescott (1981, 1997) filter (HP filter) because of three drawbacks (i. spurious cycles, ii. end-of-sample bias, iii. ad hoc assumptions regarding the smoothing parameter) and proposes a regression filter as an alternative. I demonstrate that Hamilton's...