Premium subsidies have been advocated as an alternative to social health insurance. These subsidies are paid if expenditure on health insurance exceeds a given share of income. In this paper, we examine whether this approach is superior to social insurance from a welfare perspective. We show...

In this paper we empirically examine a heterogeneous bounded rationality version of a hybrid New-Keynesian model. The model is estimated via the simulated method of moments using Euro Area data from 1975Q1 to 2009Q4. It is generally assumed that agents' beliefs display waves of optimism and...

Due to their well-known indeterminacies, factor models require identifying assumptions to guarantee unique parameter estimates. For Bayesian estimation, these identifying assumptions are usually implemented by imposing constraints on certain model parameters. This strategy, however, may result...

In a recent paper, Mertens and Ravn (2010) study the effects of anticipated fiscal policy shocks in a structural vector autoregressive model. The authors maintain that (i) the lag polynomial associated with news shocks is a cyclotomic polynomial and (ii) the matrix B(L) which transforms a...

Global impact assessment of unilateral climate policies is commonly based on multi-sector, multi-region computable general equilibrium (CGE) models that are calibrated to consistent accounts of production, consumption, and bilateral trade flows. However, global economic databases such as GTAP...

We analyze the term structure of illiquidity premiums as the difference between the yield curves of two major bond segments that are both government guaranteed but differ in their liquidity. We show that its characteristics strongly depend on the economic situation. In crisis times, illiquidity...

We pick up the standard textbook approach of money creation and develop a simple agent-based alternative. We show that our model is well suited to explain the endogenous creation of money. Although more general, our model still contains the standard results as a limiting case. We also uncover a...