Since the beginnings of the eighties house prices in the Netherlands haveincreased steadily and considerably. In this paper we study the effect of this developmenton the demand for second mortgages and on the savings of Dutch households. We use the dataof the Dutch socio-economic panel for the...

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 paper examines the sources of stickiness in aggregate consumption growth. We first derive a dynamic consumption equation which encompasses many recent developments in consumption theory: habit formation, intertemporal substitution effects, consumption based on current income, and...

The equity premium puzzle holds that the coefficient of relative risk aversion estimated from the consumption based CAPM under power utility is excessively high. Moreover, estimates in the literature vary considerably across countries. We gauge the uncertainty pertaining to the country risk...

There has been a revival of interest in the effect of risk on economic growth. We quantify both ex ante and ex post effects of risk using a stochastic version of the Ramsey model. We develop a simulation-based econometric methodology which allows us to estimate the model in the structural form...

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...

Most measures of vulnerability are a-theoretic and essentially static. In this paper we use a stochastic Ramsey model to find a household's optimal welfare and we measure vulnerability as the shortfall from the welfare attained if the household consumed permanently at the poverty line. The...

This paper uses micro data from four OECD countries (the United States, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands), to assess the determinants of household debt holding and to investigate whether or not credit constraints are important for household debt holding. We extend the existing literature in...

In this paper we estimate, for the 1989-93 period in Belgium, the effect of vocational classroom training on therate of transition out of unemployment. We show that rationing of the demand for training increases theunemployment duration of non-participants, an effect neglected in programme...

In this paper, I consider the identification of lagged durationdependence in multiple spells without using the assumtion that there are additionalregressors orthogonal to the individual effects. The non-parametricidentification strategy is applied to the multiple non-employment spells of 2066...