This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

While this is typically ignored, the properties of the stochastic process followed by aggregate consumption affect the estimates of the costs of fluctuations. This paper pursues two approaches to modelling aggregate consumption dynamics and to measuring how much society dislikes fluctuations,...

This paper analyzes the theoretical and quantitative implications of optimal capital taxation in the neoclassical growth model with aggregate shocks and incomplete markets. The model features a representative-agent economy with proportional taxes on labor and capital. I first consider the case...

While this is typically ignored, the properties of the stochastic process followed by aggregate consumption affect the estimates of the costs of fluctuations. This paper pursues two approaches to modelling aggregate consumption dynamics and to measuring how much society dislikes fluctuations,...

The 1997/98 financial crisis of Thailand has been extensively analyzed and yet, important questions remain to be answered regarding consumer behavior and its implications in regard to the crisis. This paper attempts to analyze the movements of consumer spending in Thailand during the period from...

Drawing on new empirical analysis of 30 years of structural reforms across the OECD, this paper sheds light on the impact of reforms over time, identifies the horizon over which their full effects materialise, and investigates whether such effects vary with prevailing economic conditions and...

Savings are allocated over the acquisition of assets like homes, shares and bonds and government debt paper. For a home acquisition an individual household uses own equity provided by the buyer and outside equity provided by banks. Such outside equity can help to increase the volume of new...

This paper investigates welfare gains and channels of risk sharing among 14 Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries, including the oil-rich Gulf region and the resource scarce economies such as Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia. The results show that, for the 1992-2009 period, the overall...

Falling investments in fixed assets in early 2014 were the result of the negative tendency which had formed in the construction investment complex in 2013. Investments in fixed assets in January-February this year were 95.0% while the volume of construction works was 96.2% of the corresponding...