ABSTRACT The maintenance of asset quality, efficiency and profitability is a vital requirement for the survival and development of Universal Banks. Loans constitute the main asset class from which banks generate their major portion of income and also signify the greatest risk to banks. Recently,...

This paper studies how insurance from progressive taxation improves the matching of workers to occupations. We propose an equilibrium dynamic assignment model to illustrate how social insurance encourages mobility. Workers experiment to find their best occupational fit in a process filled with...

In this paper the ability of the Economic Perception Index, IPECO, to predict aggregate consumption and other macroeconomic variables is studied. The accuracy of the predictions is improved when IPECO is used as predictor of consumption, in comparison with the predictions of an autoregressive...

Individuals engage in conspicuous consumption to signal their income to their own reference groups, defined in a fine manner by observable identifiers such as race, gender, education, and occupation. The more income inequality within a reference group, the less prior information concerning the...

This paper develops a heterogeneous agents model to analyze the effects of Social Security survivors insurance. The model features a negative mortality-income gradient, asymmetric information of individual mortality rates, and a warm-glow bequest motive that varies by age and family structure....

Objective: The objective of the article is to examine the causality between material well-being indicators of all the EU-27 countries and sustainable consumption behaviour indicators of the corresponding consumers. The authors assumed that the material well-being construct is determined by net...

Does household leverage matter for worker job search, matching in the labor market, and wages? Theoretically, household leverage can have opposing effects on the labor market through debt-overhang and liquidity constraint channels. To test which channel dominates empirically, we exploit the...

We propose a new approach to analyze economic shocks. Our new procedure identifies economic shocks as exogenous shifts in a function; hence, we call them "functional shocks." We show how to identify such shocks and how to trace their effects in the economy via VARs using "VARs with functional...

The issue of income inequality occupies a prominent position in the research agenda of academic and policy circles alike, especially after the crisis of 2008, due to its potential causal link with the development of credit bubbles and therefore the emergence of financial crises. This paper...

The traditional consumption function based on the life cycle permanent income hypothesis (LC-PIH) considers that consumer spending is based on households’ expectations of their future income. However, in short-term forecasting, the traditional economic determinants of consumption do not...