This article provides policymakers with context for understanding past and future policy discussions regarding Social Security widow benefits. Using data from surveys, projections from a microsimulation model, and recent research, it examines three types of benefits - those for aged widows,...

This essay reviews the extensive literature on empirical testing of asset pricing models. It briefly describes the kinds of asset pricing models typically tested in the literature and explicates their econometric implications, both in terms of the estimation of relevant parameters and tests of...

These notes discuss three aspects of dynamic factor pricing (i.e., APT) models. The first one is that diversifiable idiosyncratic risk is unpredictable in a no-arbitrage world. The second feature is that the conditional factor loadings or betas on the common factors are approximately constant...

It would be easy to say that central banks should consider asset prices as one of the objectives to avoid boom and bust cycles, as happened in the 2007-2009 crisis; the dotcom bubble of 2001; and the Japanese boom and bust of the 1980s and 1990s. However, its implementation would be theoretically...

Under what conditions does an economy produce and consume larger quantities of goods, a wider set of goods, or a higher quality of goods? This paper explores the effects of income inequality on product quality and variety in a simple heterogeneous household economy. The income distribution is a...

This article presents a framework for allocating partial tracking errors to investment decisions in order to maximize the expected information ratio of an actively managed portfolio. The tracking error allocation framework is a three–step process: 1) identifying the independent investment...

We study the portfolio decision of a household with limited information-processing capacity in a setting with recursive utility, which has two key features. First, intertemporal substitution and risk aversion are disentangled. Second, the household has a preference for the timing of the...

In this article, we study the situation, where by partial privatization a private company is given the opportunity to invest into a government owned business. After payment of an initial instalment cost, the private company's investments are flexible within a range $[0,k]$ until the business is...

This paper provides a framework for evaluating how market participants' beliefs about foreign exchange target zones change as they learn about central bank intervention policy. In order to examine this behavior, we first generalize the standard target zone model to allow for intra-marginal...