What does the saving-investment (SI) relation really measure and how should the SI relation be measured? These are two of the most discussed issues triggered by the so called Feldstein-Horioka puzzle. Based on panel data we introduce a new variant of functional coefficient models that allows to...

This paper argues that skill formation is a life-cycle process and develops the implications of this insight for Scottish social policy. Families are major producers of skills, and a successful policy needs to promote effective families and to supplement failing ones. We present evidence that...

This paper considers the sources of skill formation in a modern economy and emphasizes the importance of both cognitive and noncognitive skills in producing economic and social success and the importance of both formal academic institutions and families and firms as sources of learning. Skill...

We examine the causal relationship between US monetary policy shocks, exchange rates and currency excess returns for a sample of eight advanced countries over the period 1980M1 to 2022M11. We find that the dynamics of the US dollar exchange rate is the main driver of currency excess returns. The...

This dissertation consists of three independent research papers and contributes to the empirical analysis of the interaction between business and financial cycles from different perspectives. The first paper uses a non-linear multilevel dynamic factor model to better understand the changing...

We introduce a new, factor based bootstrap approach which is robust under heteroskedastic error terms for inference in functional coefficient models. Modeling the functional coefficient parametrically, the bootstrap approximation of an F statistic is shown to hold asymptotically. In simulation...