Reform of the welfare state is at the centre of political debate. In a new book, CASEmembers analyse changes in social policies over the last twenty-five years, trends inspending, outcomes of policies, and impacts on institutions and families.The stereotypes of both left and right are wrong....

The trends and consequences of terrorist activities are often captured bycounting the number of incidents and casualties. More recently, the effects of terroristacts on various aspects of the economy have been analyzed. These costs aresurveyed and put in perspective. As economic consequences are...

BEA’s national economic statistics provide a comprehensive view of U.S. production, consumption, investment, exports and imports, and income and saving. These statistics are best known by summary measures such as gross domestic product (GDP), corporate profits, personal income and spending,...

This paper shows that preferences alone cannot explain the patterns reported in the literature.

This paper proposes a novel methodology, based on the Common Principal Component analysis, allowing one to estimate the factors driving the term structure of interest rates, in the presence of time-varying covariance structure.

Many economic and econometric applications require the integration of functions lacking a closed form antiderivative, which is therefore a task that can only be solved by numerical methods. We propose a new family of probability densities that can be used as substitutes and have the property of...

There is strong empirical evidence that the pricing kernel is Ushaped,which provides a way to explain the substantial coskewnesspremium. Existing studies typically use a polynomial approximationof the pricing kernel. Problematically, these polynomials have, inmost cases, increasing parts by...

Many statistical applications require an estimate of a covariance matrix and/or its inverse.When the matrix dimension is large compared to the sample size, which happensfrequently, the sample covariance matrix is known to perform poorly and may suffer fromill-conditioning. There already exists...

[...]Ziel des vorliegenden Beitrags ist es, eine derartige Weiterentwicklung des Schätzverfahrens darzulegen und eine Neuberechnung der innerhalb der nächsten fünf Jahre zu erwartenden Unternehmensnachfolgen unter Anwen-dung dieses Schätzverfahrens vorzunehmen. Grundlage hierfür ist ein...