In order to determine how much money is needed to make each household member as well off as they were before a change in living conditions, equivalence scales should be defined on the basis of individual rather than household welfare. This requires the knowledge of individual utilities that are...

Relying on the cost of carry model, we investigate the long-run relationship between spot and futures prices and use the information implied in these cointegrating relationships to forecast out of sample oil spot and futures price movements. In order to forecast oil price movements, we employ a...

This paper studies the performance of monetary policy under alternative fiscal regimes in a dynamic New Keynesian optimizing general equilibrium model with wealth effects. The interactions between fiscal policy and interest rate rules are shown to have relevant implications for the existence of...

Unlike the value at risk, the expected shortfall is a coherent measure of risk. In this paper, we discuss estimation of the expected shortfall of a random variable Yt with special reference to the case when auxiliary information is available in the form of a set of predictors Xt. We consider...

We analyze behaviour and motivations of a sample of about one thousand consumers purchasing “fair trade (FT) goods”, i. e. food and artisan goods which include socially responsible (SR) characteristics and a price premium for primary product producers with respect to equivalent non FT...

This paper presents a model where aggregate consumption depends on both the level of wealth and the age structure of population. The explicit consideration of an endogenous rate of time preference permits to analyze the important role of population ageing as a determinant of aggregate saving.

This paper focuses on two main issues. First, we find that, on average, households’ discount rates decline. This implies dynamically inconsistent preferences. Second, we calculate an indicator of the degree of dynamic inconsistency that may help us to understand how households overcome their...

We analyze the classical asset pricing model assuming non fully rational agents. Agents forecast future prices cum dividend through an adaptive learning rule. This assumption provides an explanation of some anomalies encountered in the empirical analysis of asset prices under full rationality:...

This paper studies the effects of incentive mechanisms and of the competitive environment on the interaction between schools and students, in a set-up where the students' educational attainment depends on their peer group, on their effort, and on the quality of the school's teaching. We show...

Why do dynamic inconsistencies in monetary policy exist? In this paper a traditional model without put inefficiencies is introduced, but monetary policy is allowed to be influenced by the various constituencies in the economy, that pressure Congress in turn to pressure the central bank to adopt...