We investigate financial market integration by looking at the stock market linkages of five developed countries (France, Germany, Japan, the UK, and the US) over the period 1970:1- 2010:8. We measure the time-varying degree of world stock market integration of each country through the...

This paper examines the sources of stickiness in aggregate consumption growth. We first derive a dynamic consumption equation which nests recent developments in consumption theory: ruleof- thumb consumption, habit formation, non-separabilities between both private consumption and hours worked...

We examine the Ricardian Equivalence proposition for a panel of OECD countries in the 80s and 90s by estimating a nonlinear dynamic consumption function. We estimate this function with the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) using moment conditions that allow us to use information from the...

Existing monetary growth theories predict either negative or neutral effects from inflation on human capital. In this paper we develop a simple alternative model, which can generate positive effects. Our empirical analysis for 93 countries in 1975-1995 tends to confirm these positive effects....

The within or least squares dummy variable estimator is severely biased in homogeneous dynamic panel models with moderate T. We present a bias correction for this estimator based on an iterative bootstrap procedure. Monte Carlo simulations show that this procedure is a good alternative for the...

Empirical studies typically find that private consumption is much more sensitive to changes in current disposable income than is predicted by Hall's (JPE, 1978) permanent income hypothesis. Standard explanations for this "excess sensitivity" of private consumption refer to liquidity constraints...

We investigate the relevance of aggregate and consumer-specific income uncertainty for aggregate consumption changes in the US over the period 1952-2001. Theoretically, the effect of income risk on consumption changes is decomposed into an aggregate and into a consumer-specific part....

This paper shows that inflation crises may stimulate the accumulation of human kapital. A crucial idea is that high inflation undermines total factor productivity, which makes working and physical capital formation less attractive. If young agents consider high inflation to be temporary, they...

As is generally acknowledged, the failure of the perfect credit markets assumption underlying the permanent income hypothesis may be responsible for low consumption smoothing and observed excess sensitivity of consumption to current income. The economic literature puts forward a number of...

We investigate the relevance of aggregate and consumer-specific income uncertainty for aggregate consumption changes in the US over the period 1952-2001. Theoretically, the effect of income risk on consumption changes is decomposed into an aggregate and into a consumer-specific part....