Macroeconomic disasters (wars, pandemics, depressions) are characterized by drastic shifts and increased volatility of the aggregate consumption to income ratio. By standard intertemporal budget constraint logic, this ratio is linked to expectations of future income and consumption growth rates....

We investigate the importance of aggregate and consumer-specific or idiosyncratic labour income risk for aggregate consumption changes in the US over the period 1952-2001. Theoretically, the effect of labour income risk on consumption changes is decomposed into an aggregate and into an...

This discussion paper led to a publication in 'Computational Statistics & Data Analysis' 56(11), pp. 3398-1414.Important choices for efficient and accurate evaluation of marginal likelihoods by means of Monte Carlo simulation methods are studied for the case of highly non-elliptical posterior...

The ratio of consumption to total household wealth (i.e., tangible assets plus unobserved human wealth) is commonly calculated from the estimation of a log-linear version of the household intertemporal budget constraint as a cointegrating relationship between consumption, assets and earnings...

This paper proposes an up-to-date review of estimation strategies available for the Bayesian inference of GARCH-type models. The emphasis is put on a novel efficient procedure named AdMitIS. The methodology automatically constructs a mixture of Student-t distributions as an approximation to the...

During the last decade The Netherlands witnessed an increase in the pace of job creation and job destruction. A sensitivity analysis using an empirical model of labour market flows shows thatthe congestion in the matching process due to the increase in the pace of job creation and destruction...