The strong association between income and mortality raises the question whether more generous social security systems could improve poor people’s health outcomes. Thus, in this paper, I analyze whether a major social security innovation, the introduction of social pensions targeted at poor...

I study the impact of old-age assistance on mortality using the introduction of public pensions in the UK in 1909 as a quasi-natural experiment. Exploiting the newly created pension eligibility age through a difference-in-difference as well as an event-time design, I show that elderly mortality...

I estimate the effect of retirement on mortality, exploiting two discontinuities at age-based eligibility thresholds for pension claiming in Germany. The analysis is based on unique social security records that document the age at death for the universe of participants in the German public...

The accuracy of macroeconomic forecast depends on various factors, most importantly the mix of analytical methods used by the individual forecasters, the way that their personal experience is shaping their identification strategies, but also their efficiency in translating new information into...

This study is motivated by the development of credit-related instruments and signals of stock price movements of large banks during the recent financial crisis. What is common to most of the empirical studies in this field is that they concentrate on modeling the conditional mean. However,...

In the academic debate there is a broad consensus that house price fluctuations have a substantial impact on financial stability and real economic activity. Therefore, it is important to have timely information on actual and expected house price developments. The aim of this paper is to measure...

This study uses a Bayesian VAR to demonstrate that the recent house price boom in Germany can be explained by falling interest rates and that higher interest rates are likely suciffient to stop the increase of German house prices. The latter suggests a potential drawback of the current monetary...

This study considers Bayesian variable selection in the Phillips curve context by using the Bernoulli approach of Korobilis (2013a). The Bernoulli model, however, is unable to account for model change over time, which is important if the set of relevant predictors changes over time. To tackle...

There is empirical evidence for a time-varying relationship between exchange rates and fundamentals. Such a relationship with time-varying coefficients can be estimated by a Kalman filter model. A Kalman filter estimates the coefficients recursively depending on the prediction error of the...

This article compares two types of monetary policy rules - the Taylor-Rule and the Orphanides-Rule - with respect to their forecasting properties for the policy rates of the European Central Bank. In this respect the basic rules, results from estimated models and augmented rules are compared....