I assess the stability of the monetary environment in Switzerland over the past two centuries. In order to control for transitory measurement errors, in particular in nineteenth century data, I use an unobserved-components stochastic-volatility model to extract the permanent trends from several...

A well‐established result in the literature is that Social Security reduces steady state welfare in a standard life cycle model. However, less is known about the historical quantitative effects of the program on agents who were alive when the program was adopted. In a computational life cycle...

Die Entschuldung von über schuldeten Staaten über eine lockere Geldpolitik bzw. über finanzielle Repression sichert den Wohlstand in den Industrieländern nicht, argumentieren die Autoren. Der mit der ultra-lockeren Geldpolitik einhergehende graduelle Fall der Produktivitätsgewinne und die...

We use the shifts in Engel curves calculated from household surveys to estimate CPI biases in Argentina between 1985 and 2005. We find that real earning levels increased during this period between 4.3 and 5.7% faster per year than previously estimated. More surprisingly, relative to conventional...