This paper uses housing returns to estimate the elasticity of intertemporal substitution (EIS) in consumption for fifteen advanced economies over the postwar period 1950-2015. As housing is the main asset for the majority of households, returns on housing may be better suited to estimate the EIS...

This dissertation consists of three independent research papers and contributes to the empirical analysis of the interaction between business and financial cycles from different perspectives. The first paper uses a non-linear multilevel dynamic factor model to better understand the changing...

The equity premium puzzle holds that the coefficient of relative risk aversion estimated from the consumption based CAPM under power utility is excessively high. Moreover, estimates in the literature vary considerably across countries. We gauge the uncertainty pertaining to the country risk...

We investigate whether business cycle fluctuations affect the degree of excess sensitivity of private consumption growth to disposable income growth. Using multivariate state space methods and quarterly US data for the period 1965-2000, we find that excess sensitivity is significantly higher...

We investigate the importance of aggregate and consumer-specific or idiosyncratic labour income risk for aggregate consumption changes in the US over the period 1952-2001. Theoretically, the effect of labour income risk on consumption changes is decomposed into an aggregate and into an...

We derive a model in which a standard international capital asset pricing (ICAPM) model is nested within an ICAPM model with market imperfections. In the latter model an idiosyncratic stochastic factor affects the return of risky assets (over a risk-free rate) on top of the systematic component...