In this paper we compare the welfare effects of unemployment insurance (UI) with an universal basic income (UBI) system in an economy with idiosyncratic shocks to employment. Both policies provide a safety net in the face of idiosyncratic shocks. While the unemployment insurance program should...

Demographic change is expected to affect labour markets in very different ways on a regional scale. The objective of this paper is to explore the spatio-temporal patterns of recent distributional changes in the workers age structure, innovation output and skill composition for German regions by...

Rising costs of and returns to college have led to sizeable increases in the demand for student loans in many countries. In the U.S., student loan default rates have also risen for recent cohorts as labor market uncertainty and debt levels have increased. We discuss these trends as well as...

In this paper, we solve two problems related to growth and survival probability maximization of an economy. We assume that the problems are subject to the stochastic net worth model introduced by Fleming and Stein (2004) and apply the techniques of stochastic optimal control theory in order to...

In this paper, we investigate the forecasting ability of the yield curve in terms of the U.S. real GDP cycle. More specifically, within a Machine Learning (ML) framework, we use data from a variety of short (treasury bills) and long term interest rates (bonds) for the period from 1976:Q3 to...

The relationship between risk and return is one of the most studied topics in finance. The majority of the literature is based on a linear, parametric relationship between expected returns and conditional volatility. This paper models the contemporaneous relationship between market excess...

We investigate the R&D portfolio of a monopolist investing in cost-reducing and quality enhancing R&D. Incentives along the two directions are inversely related to the size of market demand, and independent of each other. The stability analysis shows the existence of a unique stable steady state...

This paper discusses estimation of US inflation volatility using time varying parameter models, in particular whether it should be modelled as a stationary or random walk stochastic process. Specifying inflation volatility as an unbounded process, as implied by the random walk, conflicts with...

The time-varying parameter vector autoregressive (TVP-VAR) model has been used to successfully model interest rates and other variables. As many short interest rates are now near their zero lower bound (ZLB), a feature not included in the standard TVP-VAR specification, this model is no longer...

This article develops a new econometric methodology for performing stochastic model specification search (SMSS) in the vast model space of time-varying parameter VARs with stochastic volatility and correlated state transitions. This is motivated by the concern of over-fitting and the typically...