Over the past four decades, advanced economies experienced a large growth in gross external portfolio positions. This phenomenon has been described as Financial Globalization. Over roughly the same time frame, most of these countries also saw a substantial fall in the level and variability of...

We study the impact of anticipated fiscal policy changes in a Ramsey economy where agents form long-horizon expectations using adaptive learning. We ex- tend the existing framework by introducing distortionary taxes as well as elastic labour supply, which makes agents' decisions...

New methods of analysis of patent statistics allow assessing country profiles of technological specialization for the period 1990-2006. We witness a modest decrease in levels of specialization, which we show to be negatively influenced by country size and degree of internationalization of...

Although standard incomplete market models can account for the magnitude of the rise in consumption inequality over the life cycle, they generate unrealistically concave age profiles of consumption inequality and unrealistically less wealth inequality. In this paper, I investigate the role of...

The debate on tobacco and fat taxes often treats smoking and eating as independent behaviors. However, the available evidence shows that they are interdependent, which implies that policies against smoking or obesity may have larger scope than expected. To address this issue, we propose a...

This paper proposes a novel way of testing exogeneity of an explanatory variable without any parametric assumptions in the presence of a "conditional" instrumental variable. A testable implication is derived that if an explanatory variable is endogenous, the conditional distribution of the...

This paper proposes a model of choice that does not assume completeness of the decision maker's preferences. The model explains in a natural way, and within a unied framework of choice when preference-incomparable options are present, four behavioural phenomena: the attraction effect, choice...

We compare three methods for the elicitation of time preferences in an experimental setting: the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak procedure (BDM); the second price auction; and the multiple price list format. The first two methods have been used rarely to elicit time preferences. All methods used are...

This paper proposes a new methodology, the Domination Index, to evaluate non-income inequalities between social groups such as inequalities of educational attainment, occupational status, health or subjective wellbeing. The Domination Index does not require specific cardinalisation assumptions,...

In this paper we assume that for some commodities individuals may wish to adjust their levels of consumption from their normal Marshallian levels so as to match the consumption levels of a group of other individuals, in order to signal that they conform to the consumption norms of that group....