The paper discusses similarities and differences between NDC and the French and German point systems. The study focuses on how these systems differ when there is an external shock (demographic, economic, or other) and discusses the possible consequences of moving from the point system to NDC....

This paper assesses the impact on growth and the inter-generational redistributive effects of some possible pension reforms in France using a dynamic general equilibrium model with overlapping generations. Results suggest that a reform increasing the effective average retirement age by 1.25...

We analyse the economic impact of a simultaneous aging shock in two countries. The countries are identical in all respects except the financing scheme of their public pension system. While one relies on capitalization, the other one relies on a pay-as-you-go scheme. We show that the two...

This paper describes an algorithm to compute the distribution of conditional forecasts,i.e. projections of a set of variables of interest on future paths of some othervariables, in dynamic systems. The algorithm is based on Kalman filtering methods andis computationally viable for large vector...

In this paper, we extract common factors from a cross-section of U.S. macro-variables and Treasury zero-coupon yields. We find that two macroeconomic factors have an important predictive content for government bond yields and excess returns. These factors are not spanned by the cross-section of...

Vector autoregressions (VARs) are flexible time series models that can capture complex dynamic interrelationships among macroeconomic variables. However, their dense parameterization leads to unstable inference and inaccurate out-of-sample forecasts, particularly for models with many variables....

This paper shows that Vector Autoregression with Bayesian shrinkage is an appropriate tool for large dynamic models. We build on the results by De Mol, Giannone, and Reichlin (2008) and show that, when the degree of shrinkage is set in relation to the cross-sectional dimension, the forecasting...

This paper documents a new stylized fact of the U.S. greater macroeconomic stability of the last two decades or so. Using 131 monthly time series, three popular statistical methods and the forecasts of the Federal Reserve's Green book and the Survey of Professional Forecasters, we show that the...