A bank that lends money to a household faces two types of risk. Most commonly mentioned is the risk of a default. Hardly ever referred to is the risk of an early redemption of the loan - leading to dormancy. We model consumer loans' transition from an active to a dormant state and estimate a...

In this paper we apply a bivariate probit model to investigate the implications of bank lending policy. In the first equation we model the bank´s decision to grant a loan, in the second the probability of default. We confirm that banks provide loans in a way that is not consistent with default...

The main instrument of monetary policy in industrialized countries is currently a short-term interest rate. It typically remains unchanged during long spans of time. This paper tries to answer three questions. Why do Central Banks change targeted interest rates so seldom? How should we estimate...

To evaluate loan applicants, banks use a large variety of systems. The objective of such credit scoring models typically is to minimize default rates or the number of incorrectly classified loans. Thereby they fail to take into account that loans are multiperiod contracts. From a utility...

Employee share ownership is growing increasingly important. This paper studies employee share ownership in an economy with one monopoly union for each firm. We modify an implicit contra t model by adding dividend income to the usual wage income. Union members differ in exogenous stock endowments...

We study three necessary conditions for work sharing to increase employment. First, there must exist a negative long-run relation between working time and employment. Second, hours per worker must be exogenous with respect to wages and employment. Third, policy makers must be able to influence...

In this paper we propose an alternative method for investigating the sources behind the behavior of real wages and unemployment. The statistical model we study is a certain structural error correction model, a so called common trends model, which has become popular in the empirical...

We examine the sources of labor market fluctuations in the Scandinavian countries using VAR models with common trends. Our primary concerns are the sources of hysteresis in unemployment and possible differences between the economies. A simple economic model is presented to motivate our...

When testing for cointegration, the asymptotic inference typically in use can be plagued by size distortion due to an inadequate first order approximation. Hence, for practical purposes the inference can be completely misleading and result in false conclusions regarding the presence of long-run...

This paper investigates the relative importance of foreign and domestic shocks for the Swedish postwar business cycle in a neoclassical stochastic growth model of a small open economy. We extend previous work in the literature by allowing for stochastic fiscal policy, since recent research has...