Public pensions - the primary pillar of old-age income provision - will, in the future, be less generous than they have been in the past, in particular owing to the impact of demographic change. The pension gap is supposed to be plugged by the second and third pillars of pension provision....

This paper modifies standard block Gauss-Seidel iterations used by tatonnement methods for solving large scale deterministic heterogeneous agent models. The composite method between first- and second-order tatonnement methods is shown to considerably improve convergence both in terms of speed as...

This paper analyzes the relationship between stock prices, house prices and consumption using data for 16 OECD countries. The panel data analysis suggests that the long-run responsiveness of consumption to permanent changes in stock prices is higher for countries with a market-based financial...

We present a quantitative analysis of international capital flows induced by differ-ential population aging and pension reform. It is well known that within each country, demo-graphic change alters the time path of aggregate savings. This process may be amplified if pension reform shifts old-age...

Throughout the world, population aging is a major challenge that will continue well into the 21 st century. While the patterns of the demographic transition are similar in most countries, timing differs substantially, in particular between industrialized and less developed countries. To the...

We present an improved approach to examine convergence of markets such as those for equity, bonds or commodities. The approach is motivated by Monte Carlo simulations and consists of two steps. First, we test for regime-shifts in the cointegration paths and cointegration with structural breaks....