n.a.

The 'saving for a rainy day' hypothesis implies that households' saving decisions reflect that they can (rationally) predict future income declines. The empirical relevance of this hypothesis plays a key role in discussions of fiscal policy multipliers and it holds under the null that the...

With the aid of econometric modeling, I investigate whether rapidly increasing house prices necessarily imply the existence of a bubble that will eventually burst. I consider four alternative econometric methods to construct indicators of housing market imbalances for the US, Finland and Norway....

The temporal interdependence between saving and output has been in focus in a number of recent empirical studies. Results from these studies have compelled some authors to question the traditional notion of a causal chain where saving leads growth through capital accumulation. This paper...

In this paper, we address the issue of spurious correlation in the production of health in a systematic way. Spurious correlation entails the risk of linking health status to medical (and nonmedical) inputs when no links exist. This note first presents the bounds testing procedure as a method to...

We evaluate how non-normality of asset returns and the temporal evolution of volatility and higher moments affects the conditional allocation of wealth. We show that if one neglects these aspects, as would be the case in a mean-variance allocation, a significant cost would arise. The performance...

The recently proposed class of MixN-GARCH models, which couple a mixed normal distributional structure with linked GARCH-type dynamics, has been shown to offer a plausible decomposition of the contributions to volatility, as well as admirable out-of-sample forecasting performance, for financial...

Economic cycles are the key credit portfolio risk driver and they are autocorrelated over time. We then show that it is economically meaningful to define risk for credit portfolios in a multi period setup. Since one period expected shortfall fails to measure risk adequately in a multi period...