The accuracy of the solution of dynamic general equilibrium models has become a major issue. Recent papers, substituting second order for first order approximations, have shown to obtain significant differences in accuracy. Second order approximations have had some considerable success in...

We study the mechanism of inequality due to educational lock-in effects. Recent research on inequality such as Brock and Durlauf (2000a, b) and Durlauf (1999a, b, 2000) has emphasized the fact that the composition and behavior of groups to which a person belongs play an important role for...

Inspired by findings of nonlinearities and the Theorem of Takens (1981), forecasting models of financial time series are often built upon nonlinear univariate relationships. Empirical investigations, however, are seriously contaminated by the problem of overfitting, in particular in the presence...

Following the lead of Merton (1974), recent research has focused on the relationship of credit risk to firm value. Although this has usually been done for a single firm, the growth of structured finance, which necessarily involves the correlation between included securities, has spurred interest...

Using standard preferences for asset pricing has not been very successful to match asset price characteristics such as the risk-free interest rate, equity premium and the Sharpe ratio to time series data. Behavioral finance has recently proposed more realistic preferences such as preferences...

Economic research of the last decade linking macroeconomic fundamentals to asset prices has revealed evidence that standard intertemporal asset pricing theory is not successful in explaining (unconditional) first moments of asset market characteristics such as the risk free intrest rate, stock...

In this paper we demonstrate that a standard loss function of a central bank may generate multiple equilibria which can contribute to hysteresis effects on the labor market. Multiple equilibria are feasible if the objective function of the central bank is non-quadratic. Such preferences may...