Much of the industrialized world is undergoing a significantdemographic shift, placing strain on public pension systems. Policymakers are responding with pension system reforms that put more weight on privately managed retirement funds. One concern with these changes is the effect on individual...

A large body of literature explains the inferior position of unskilled workersby imposing a structural shift in the labor force skill composition. This papertakes a different approach by emphasizing the connection between cyclicalvariations in skilled and unskilled labor markets. Using a...

Standard models of equilibrium unemployment assume exogenous labour market institutions and flexible wage determination. This paper models wage rigidity and collective bargaining endogenously, when workers differ by observable skill and may adopt either individualised or collective wage...

A great proportion of stock dynamics can be explained using publicly availableinformation. The relationship between dynamics and public information may be ofnonlinear character. In this paper we offer an approach to stock picking by employing so-called decision trees and applying them to XETRA...

This paper seeks to disentangle the sources of correlations between high-, mid- and lowcap stock indexes from the German prime standard. In principle, such comovement can arise from direct spillover between the variables or due to common factors. By standard means, these different components are...

This paper is a progress report on understanding the relationship betweenprices and allocations of risks on financial markets versus macroeconomicchoices and allocations. In this paper, I investigate the scope of a modelwith exogenous habit formation – or “catching up with the Joneses”,...

Using structural VARs, I find that external shocks are an important source of macroeconomic fluctuations in emerging markets. Furthermore, U.S. monetary policy shocks affect quickly and strongly interest rates and the exchange rate in a typical emerging market. The price level and real output in...

We decompose by origin the sources of the variation in real aggregate output and aggregate price level in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. We find that a sizable fraction of the variation is attributable to external shocks, especially so for aggregate price level. We show that euroarea...

Risk management technology applied to high dimensional portfolios needs simple and fast methods for calculation of Value-at-Risk (VaR). The multivariate normal framework provides a simple off-the-shelf methodology but lacks the heavy tailed distributional properties that are observed in data. A...

In the data, individual prices change frequently and by large amounts. In standardsticky price models, frequent and large price changes imply a fast response of the aggregate price level to nominal shocks. This paper presents a model in which price setting firms optimally decide what to observe,...