The typical social security program is designed as follows: (1) It is organized as a pay-asyou-go system. (2) It is financed with a payroll tax. (3) Employers and employees share the tax. (4) Benefits are largely independent of asset income. (5) Benefits are increasing with the taxes paid. (6)...

This paper investigates how parametric reform in a pay-as-you-go pension system with a tax benefit link affects retirement incentives and work incentives of prime-age workers. We find that postponed retirement tends to harm incentives of prime-age workers in the presence of a tax benefit link,...

We incorporate Keeping-up-with-the-Joneses (KUJ) preferences into the Blanchard-Yaari (BY) framework and develop, using an AK technology, a model of balanced growth. In this context we investigate status preference, demographic, and pension policy shocks. We find that a higher degree of KUJ...

This paper analyzes the relationship between stock returns and exchange rate changes in international markets and examines how well exchange rate volatility explains movements in stock market returns. The model-based predictions are evaluated on several cost functions. Results from such analysis...

In a panel of West African countries, we investigate whether data on immigrant remittance flows can be used to improve on predictive accuracy of aggregate demand in a systematic way. The results of the prediction experiments are compared to traditional significance tests of asymmetric error...

We use data generated by a macroeconomic DSGE model to study the relative benefits of forecast combinations based on forecast-encompassing tests relative to simple uniformly weighted forecast averages across rival models. Assumed rival models are four linear autoregressive specifications, one of...

For many economic time-series variables that are observed regularly and frequently, for example weekly, the underlying activity is not distributed uniformly across the year. For the aim of predicting annual data, one may consider temporal aggregation into larger subannual units based on an...

This paper proposes a strategy to increase the efficiency of forecast combining methods. Given the availability of a wide range of forecasting models for the same variable of interest, our goal is to apply combining methods to a restricted set of models. To this aim, an algorithm procedure based...

This paper examines the relevance of incorporating seasonality in agricultural supply models. Former studies have eliminated the problem of seasonality by using seasonally adjusted data. Recent developments in cointegration techniques allow the comprehensive modelling of error-correcting...