We set up an agent-based macromodel focusing on consumption-saving without the assumption of utility maximization, but preserving certain "rational" aspects of human choice based on the idea of ecological rationality Todd et al. (2012). In this framework we address the classical problem of the...

A basic principle of economics is that people always prefer a larger set of opportunities. Money illusion can be considered as the phenomenon that people may not perceive correctly their budget constraints, and may act in ways that run counter to this preference. In this view money illusion is a...

In this paper we analyze statistics derived from the cross-wavelet transform of inflation differentials and exchange rate changes for a group of countries with Germany as the reference country. An important tool is the wavelet coherency measure from which we can judge the strength of the...

Men's labor income is on average higher than that of women practically everywhere. This gender pay gap can be decomposed into two components: on the one hand men usually work in better paid jobs (the sorting effect), and, on the other, even in the same occupation men get higher wages (the...

We estimate the gender pay gap with the traditional OLS based Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition, and with an extension using Random Forest (RF) regressions on Hungarian data for the years 2008-2016. Random Forests perform better as predictors out-of-sample and yield consistently lower estimates for...

The gender earnings gap can be attributed either to the different distribution of males and females across jobs or to within job biases in favour of men. The latter is frequently called the wage structure effect, and it may be interpreted as wage discrimination against women. In this paper we...

We estimate heterogeneous wage structure effects for country-pairs within the EU by the Causal Forest algorithm, then identify groups of workers with the highest and lowest discrepancies in terms of wage differentials. We find that, in the East-West comparison, age is the most consistently...

The paper adresses several issues pertaining to the problem of monetary policy, inflation measurement, and relative prices. After some preliminary empirical analysis showing that the problem must be relevant we set out to conduct a mainly theoretical investigation. If the per period utility...

The traditional CPI measure has many drawbacks, when used for very different purposes, and it is not at all surprising that a great deal of work has been devoted to its improvement. Besides seasonal adjustment, various other techniques have been developed to find the “core” inflation index....