We use cross-country microdata to analyse the risk taking of households in Europe and the US. Concerning the extensive as well as the intensive margin of risky assets, European households differ substantially from US households; but also inside Europe we document substantial differences....

This paper provides new insights on the effect of inheritance receipt on retirement. We build on lifelong information on inheritances received and labor market transitions available for respondents of the French Wealth Survey. This feature allows us to compare current retirement rates among...

How much of the heterogeneity in bank loan pricing is explained by disparities in banks' attitude towards risk? The answer to this question is not simple because there are only very weak proxies for gauging the degree of a bank's risk aversion. We handle this constraint by means of a novel...

This paper proposes a novel method for conducting policy analysis with potentially misspecified dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models and applies it to a New Keynesian DSGE model along the lines of Christiano, Eichenbaum, and Evans (JPE 2005) and Smets and Wouters (JEEA 2003)....

In this paper, I evaluate the performance deterioration that occurs when the central bank employs an optimal targeting rule that is based on incorrect parameter values. I focus on two parameters the degree of inflation inertia and the degree of price stickiness. I explicitly account for the...

This paper develops a rigorous econometric framework to investigate the structure of codependence between random variables and to test whether it changes over time. Our approach is based on the computation - over both a test and a benchmark period - of the conditional probability that a random...

This paper proposes a procedure to investigate the nature and persistence of the forces governing the yield curve and to use the extracted information for forecasting purposes. The latent factors of a model of the Nelson-Siegel type are directly linked to the maturity of the yields through the...

We review, under a historical perspective, the development of the problem of nonfundamentalness of Moving Average (MA) representations of economic models. Nonfundamentalness typically arises when agents'information space is larger than the econometrician's one. Therefore it is impossible for the...

We propose a refinement of the criterion by Bai and Ng [2002] for determining the number of static factors in factor models with large datasets. It consists in multiplying the penalty function by a constant which tunes the penalizing power of the function itself as in the Hallin and Lika [2007]...

We study 30 vintages of FRB/US, the principal macro model used by the Federal Reserve Board staff for forecasting and policy analysis. To do this, we exploit archives of the model code, coefficients, baseline databases and stochastic shock sets stored after each FOMC meeting from the model's...