This paper analyzes current practices at U.S. banks for quantifying credit in retail portfolios and examines the challenges confronting banks and regulators in developing an internal ratings based (IRB) approach to setting capital requirements for retail exposures. The paper finds that...

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In this paper we consider polynomial cointegrating relationships between stationary processes with long range dependence. We express the regression functions in terms of Hermite polynomials and we consider a form of spectral regression around frequency zero. For these estimates, we establish...

This paper examines the inflationary consequences of a currency changeover in a simple model of the catering market. It is shown that the change in cash denomination acts as a coordination device shifting the industry to a high-price equilibrium. Empirical evidence based on data from the...

This paper explores the interrelation between health and work decisions of older workers. For this, two issues are of relevance. Firstly, health and work may be endogenously related because of direct effects of health on work and vice versa, and because of unobservables that may relate observed...

We estimate, using a previously unexploited set of data for the Italian public debt, quarterly yield curves over the period 1970-1996 to test the main implications of the expectations hypothesis theory (EH). Our empirical results show that short-term interest rates move according to the...

This paper is concerned with the problem of ranking Lorenz curves in situations where the Lorenz curves intersect and no unambiguous ranking can be attained without introducing weaker ranking criteria than first-degree Lorenz dominance. To deal with such situations two alternative sequences of...

The paper analyzes the relationship between stock prices and fundamentals for a large sample of US stocks in the last ten years using a random coefficient model. Heterogeneity and omitted variable bias are properly taken into account with model coefficients being allowed to vary across time and...

This paper investigates the consequences of the currency devaluation, both in levels and rates, on the balance of payments in a cash-in-advance economy with finite horizons, endogenous capital accumulation and international capital immobility. In this context, a once and for all currency...

We present a simple model where the growth of one downstream firm generates lower wholesale prices for this firm but higher wholesale prices for its competitors (the “waterbed effect”). We derive conditions for when, even though firms compete in strategic complements, this harms consumers....