This paper presents and assesses a procedure to generate recursive measures of aggregate total wealth and portfolio return. The procedure is more flexible and yields more realistic measures, compared to the classical replacement cost and present value methods.

In the recent SVAR literature, the liquidity effect has been studied by imposing a variety of identifying restrictions required under the assumption that the SVAR fundamental disturbances are homoscedastic. Using typical SVAR processes, we first show that this assumption is not supported by the...

This paper gauges consumption and portfolio shares for aggregate assets (i.e. financial, tangible, and human assets) and disaggregated assets (i.e. deposits, stocks, and reserves for life insurance and pensions), rather than traditional underlying pricing implications for stocks. Hence, our...

The permanent income hypothesis under certainty equivalence implies that optimal consumption is more volatile than labour income, when labour income is positively autocorrelated in first differences. Empirically, certainty equivalence is rejected because observed consumption is excessively...

The permanent income hypothesis under certainty equivalence yields a martingale consumption process. Empirically, this hypothesis is rejected because consumption is excessively sensitive to anticipated income. One approach to account for excess sensitivity is to relax certainty equivalence by...

We perform an empirical evaluation of the role of capacity utilization in business cycle fluctuations. We first document the relation between capacity utilization and business cycle fluctuations in historical data and then verify whether these empirical features can be explained by a dynamic...

This paper gauges the international integration hypothesis, i.e. risk-adjusted anticipated returns are identical, even when financial instruments are traded in different countries. This hypothesis is verified by testing the equality between domestic and foreign risk prices induced by a...

This paper studies the effects of fiscal policies on external and budget deficits. From a tractable small open-economy, overlapping-generation model, the effects are measured by the responses of the external deficit to an increase in the budget deficit due to a tax-cut. The responses are...