Despite its key contribution to global economic growth through the 1960s and 1970s, in recent decades the rise of China has seen the importance of Japan recede from the public discourse. This is notwithstanding its continuing key role as investor and trading partner. Yet this role has been...

It is commonly understood that macroeconomic shocks influence commodity prices and that one channel for this is the link between interest rates, expected future asset returns and stockholding. In this paper the link is extended to the petroleum market with the recognition that recorded stocks of...

We study a newly released data set of scanner prices for food products in a large Swiss online supermarket. We find that average prices change about every two months, but when we exclude temporary sales, prices are extremely sticky, changing on average once every three years. Non-sale price...

Despite its key contribution to global economic growth through the 1960s and 1970s, in recent decades the rise of China has seen the importance of Japan recede from the public discourse. This is notwithstanding its continuing key role as global investor and trading partner. Yet this role has...

We show the importance of endogenous oil prices and production in the real business cycle framework. Endogenising these variables improves the model’s predictions of business cycle statistics, oil related and non-oil related, relative to a situation where either is exogenous. This result is...

The term premium is estimated from an empirically coherent open economy VAR model of the UK economy where the model specifically accounts for the mixed nature of the data and cointegration between some variables. Using this framework the estimated negative term premia for 1980-2007 is decomposed...

Inclusion of means testing into age pension programs allows governments to better direct benefits to those most in need and to control funding costs by providing flexibility to control the participation rate (extensive margin) and the benefit level (intensive margin). The former is aimed at...

This paper compares the effects of immigration flows on economic outcomes and crime levels to the public opinion about these effects using individual and regional data for Australia. We employ an instrumental variables strategy to account for non-random location choices of immigrants and find...

We consider risk-averse individuals who differ in two characteristics - ability to benefit from education and inherited wealth - and analyze higher education participation under two alternative financing schemes - tax subsidy and (risk-sharing) income-contingent loans. With decreasing absolute...

We estimate the average return to education and the ability bias applying a parametric model of intra-household correlation suggested by Card (1999, 2001) to the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey. Using the subsample of dual-earner households, we obtain an average return...