Using Italian data, we estimate an option value model to quantify the effectof financial incentives on retirement choices. As far as we know, this isthe first empirical study to estimate the conditional multiple-years modelput forward by Stock and Wise (1990). This implies that we account...

The perpetual inventory method used for the construction of education data per country leads to systematic measurement error. This paper analyses the effect of this measurement error on GDP regressions. There is a systematic difference in the education level between census data and observations...

This paper focuses on the role of habit formation in individual preferencesover consumption and saving. We closely relate to Alessie and Lusardi's(1997) model as we estimate a model which is based on their closed-formsolution, where saving is expressed as a function of lagged saving and...

We propose a new methodology for designing flexible proposal densities for the joint posterior density of parameters and states in a nonlinear non-Gaussian state space model. We show that a highly efficient Bayesian procedure emerges when these proposal densities are used in an independent...

This paper has been accepted for publication in the 'Review of Economics and Statistics'.We propose a dynamic factor model for mixed-measurement and mixed-frequency panel data. In this framework time series observations may come from a range of families of parametric distributions, may be...

We study the performance of alternative methods for calculating in-sample confidence and out of-sample forecast bands for time-varying parameters. The in-sample bands reflect parameter uncertainty only. The out-of-sample bands reflect both parameter uncertainty and innovation uncertainty. The...

We introduce a new model for time-varying spatial dependence. The model extends the well-known static spatial lag model. All parameters can be estimated conveniently by maximum likelihood. We establish the theoretical properties of the model and show that the maximum likelihood estimator for the...