The authors develop a simple model in which the presence of portfolio insurers in a market of risk-averse traders leads to multiple equilibria for the pricing of financial assets and can cause an increase in volatility, including insurance-induced price drops. They demonstrate, however, that centralized portfolio insurance firms may actually reduce, not increase, volatility even if the existence of these firms increases the total amount of funds under insurance.

This paper proposes a Bayesian approach t o a v ector autoregression with stochastic volatility, where the multiplicative e v olution of the precision matrix is driven by a m ultivariate beta variate.Exact updating formulas are given to the nonlinear ltering of the precision matrix.Estimation of the autoregressive parameters requires numerical methods: an importance-sampling based approach is explained here.i

We fully characterize the equilibria in a gme between a fund manager of unknown ability who control the riskiness of his portfolio and investors who only observe realized returns. We derive two types of equilibria. The first one is such that (i) investors invest in the fund if the realized return falls within some interval, i.e., is neither too low nor too high, (ii) a good manager picks a portfolio of minimal riskiness and (iii) a bad manager picks a portfolio with higher risk, “gambling” on a lucky outcome. The second type of equilibrium is more traditional: (i) investors invest in the fund if the observed return is larger than some threshold, and (ii) good and bad managers choose the same risk level.

The 2008 financial crisis and its policy response has urgently raised the old question of the impact of fiscal policy, in particular government spending and tax cuts, on the economy. This paper contributes to this debate, using a simple neoclassical growth model with endogenous labor, adding fiscal instruments to provide a positive rather than normative analysis of the impact of fiscal policy shocks. It is shown that the timing of the tax response to the ensuing deficits may be crucial and that the calculations of fiscal multipliers can be misleading. Keywords: JEL codes: 2 1 A short introduction What is the impact of fiscal policy on the economy? How large are the “multipliers ” of government spending and tax cuts? This old question has recently received considerable attention. This paper contributes to answering that question by thinking through fiscal multipliers in a baseline neoclassical

In this paper, I investigate the scope of a model with exogenous habit formation - or `catching up with the Joneses`, see Abel (1990) - to generate the observed equity premium as well as other key macroeconomic facts. Along the way, I derive restrictions for four out of eight parameters for a rather general preference specification of habit formation by imposing consistency with long-run growth, the leisure share, the aggregate Frisch elasticity of labor supply, the observed risk-free rate, and the observed Sharpe ratio. I show that a DSGE model with (exogenous and lagged) habits in both leisure and consumption, but not necessarily with additional persistence, is well capable of matching the observed asset market facts as well as macro facts, provided one allows for moderate real wage stickiness and provided one allows for sufficient curvature on preferences, as dictated by the asset market observations. Without wage stickiness, delivery on both the asset pricing implications as well as the macroeconomic implications seems to be much harder.

Fifteen years after German reunification, the facts about slow regional convergence have born out the prediction of Barro (1991), except that migration out of East Germany has not slowed down. I document that in particular the 18-29 year old are leaving East Germany, and that the emigration has accelerated in recent years. To understand these patterns, I provide an extension of the standard labor search model by allowing for migration and network externalities. In that theory, two equilibria can result: one with a high networking rate, high average labor productivity, low unemployment and no emigration (“West Germany”) and one with a low networking rate, low average labor productivity, high unemployment and a constant rate of emigration (“East Germany”). The model does not imply any obviously sound policies to move from the weakly networked equilibrium to the highly networked equilibrium.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Econometrics

We study financial intermediation in which sufficient sorting is impossible. We identify a new type of market failure that may occur even when returns of investing entrepreneurs are verifiable. Moreover, we suggest that the nature of competition determines the contracts banks offer. A monopoly bank will offer equity contracts. In any pure strategy equilibrium when lenders compete à la Bertrand, however, only debt contracts are offered.

We document dramatic changes in euro area interbank money markets during the financial and sovereign debt crises: unsecured borrowing declined across the euro area, while secured market haircuts on sovereign bonds increased, and bank borrowing from the European Central Bank rose in southern countries. We construct a quantitative general equilibrium model to assess the macroeconomic impact of these developments and the associated policy response. Our model features heterogeneous banks and sovereign bonds, secured and unsecured money markets, and a central bank. We compare a benchmark policy—the central bank providing collateralized lending to banks at haircuts lower than the market—with an alternative policy that maintains a constant central bank balance sheet. We show that the fall in output, investment, and capital would have been twice as high under the alternative policy.