In this paper we investigate whether accounting for non-pervasive shocks improves the forecast of a factor model. We compare four models on a large panel of US quarterly data: factor models, factor models estimated on selected variables, Bayesian shrinkage, and factor models together with...

This paper studies U.S. inflation adjustment speed to aggregate technology shocks and to monetary policy shocks in a Bayesian VAR model with a large number of macroeconomic variables. According to the model estimated on the 1960-2007 sample, inflation adjusts much faster to aggregate technology...

This paper quantifies how variation in real economic activity and inflation in the U.S. influenced the market prices of level, slope, and curvature risks in U.S. Treasury markets. We develop a novel arbitrage-free dynamic term structure model in which bond investment decisions are influenced by...

Life insurers typically grant policyholders a surrender option. We demonstrate that the resulting lapse risk could materialise in the form of a "policyholder run" if interest rates were to increase sharply. An inverse stress test based on a unique set of regulatory panel data suggests that...

The life insurance sector is exposed to systematic liquidity risk, because policyholders would have a common incentive to surrender their policies in the event of a severe macroeconomic shock. Life insurers would, then, have to sell assets, and these fire sales would amplify the original shock....

Life insurers typically grant policyholders a surrender option. We demonstrate that the resulting lapse risk could materialise in the form of a "policyholder run" if interest rates were to increase sharply. An inverse stress test based on a unique set of regulatory panel data suggests that...

Socio-economic status is commonly conceptualised as the social standing or well-being of an individual or society. Higher socio-economic status has long been identified as a contributing factor for mortality improvement. This paper studies the impact of macroeconomic fluctuations (having GDP as...

The COVID-19 pandemic interrupts the relatively steady trend of improving longevity observed in many countries over the last decades. We claim that this needs to be addressed explicitly in many mortality modeling applications, for example in the life insurance industry. To support this position,...

Mortality shocks such as the one induced by the COVID-19 pandemic have substantial impact on mortality models. We describe how to deal with them in the period effect of the Lee-Carter model. The main idea is to not rely on the usual normal distribution assumption as it is not always justified....

Essentially, the impact of the currency union on member countries depends on whether the common currency area is optimal in the sense that the effect of the asymmetric shocks is small, Mundell (1961). Typically, researchers use VAR of different types to analyze the data. For robustness, we use...