On 5-6 September 2012 SUERF held its 30th Colloquium "States, Banks, and the Financing of the Economy" at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the Colloquium. All the chapters in this publication discuss from different...

On May 11-12, 2011, SUERF, the Belgian Financial Forum, the Brussels Finance Institute and the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) jointly organised the 29th SUERF Colloquium New paradigms in money and finance? The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the...

We analyze the theoretical moments of a nonlinear approximation to real business cycle model with stochastic volatility and recursive preferences. We find that the conditional heteroskedasticity of stochastic volatility operationalizes a time-varying risk adjustment channel that induces...

The long-run consumption risk (LRR) model is a convincing approach towards resolving prominent asset pricing puzzles. Whilst the simulated method of moments (SMM) provides a natural framework to estimate its deep parameters, caveats concern model solubility and weak identification. We propose a...

The rare disaster hypothesis suggests that the extraordinarily high postwar U.S. equity premium resulted because investors ex ante demanded compensations for unlikely but calamitous risks that they happened not to incur. While convincing in theory, empirical tests of the rare disaster...

In March 2012 a conference, organised jointly by the ICFR and SUERF, on "Future Risks and Fragilities for Financial Stability", explored what the next pressure points for financial stability might be, how these may arise from the response to the last financial crisis, and how the industry and...

Liberalized electricity markets are characterized by a fluctuating price-inelastic demand, non-storable electricity and often show substantial market shares held by one or few incumbent firms. These characteristics have led to a controversial discussion concerning the need for and the design of...

This paper develops an innovation model where firms choose which research paths to follow. Contrary to most of the literature which focuses only on the level of investment in innovation, this model captures both the variety of research paths undertaken and the amount of duplication of research....

There is a growing empirical literature studying whether fiscal rules reduce borrowing costs. Nevertheless, it remains an open question whether these rules are effective genuinely or just because they mirror fiscal preferences of politicians and voters. In our analysis of European bond spreads,...

This paper shows that the consumption-based asset pricing model (C-CAPM) with low-probability disaster risk rationalizes large pricing errors, i.e., Euler equation errors. This result is remarkable, since Lettau and Ludvigson (2009) show that leading asset pricing models cannot explain sizeable...