The aim of the study is to analyze the concept of systemic risk. The study reviews a multitude of systemic risk definitions in the literature. In addition, the paper identifies factors that contribute to the build-up of systemic risk (vulnerabilities), the spreading of contagion and provides a...

The global financial crisis that began in 2007 and deepened in 2008 exposed major weaknesses in financial and macroeconomic policy coordination, and profound flaws in financial risk management and regulation in a number of advanced countries. The severity of the crisis led global leaders to...

TOPALS is a relational model that can be used for smoothing and projecting age-specific rates or probabilities. TOPALS uses a linear spline to model the ratios between the age-specific rates or probabilities to be fitted or projected and a smooth standard age schedule. TOPALS is easy and...

In a well-known and widely-cited paper, Akerlof, Yellen, and Katz (1996) proposed a novel and counter-intuitive explanation for the rise of non-marital births in the U.S. that emphasized the way in which improved birth control and legalized abortion altered social norms about the responsibility...

Why do some people think they will behave differently in the future? Building on research on dynamic inconsistency and age related preferences, this paper introduces the concept that inconsistent intertemporal preferences are directly related to age. In previous studies, standard socioeconomic...

Recent empirical migration literature in South Africa suggests that access to physical and human capital, in the way of finance and education respectively, are key factors in increasing one’s probability of migrating. This paper attempts to extend this literature by directly measuring the...