This paper analyzes the behaviour and motivation of fund managers in foreign exchange markets reflected in questionnaire evidence. We find that fund managers and FX dealers differ significantly. Fund managers rely more on fundamentals, basically due to their longer forecasting horizons, and reject non-fundamental influences on exchange rates more than FX dealers. However, neither can fund manag...

In this paper, we study the potential of stocks as a hedge against inflation for different investment horizons. We show that stocks can be a hedge against inflation even if stock returns are negatively correlated with unexpected inflation shocks, and only moderately positively related to expected inflation. Depending on the investment horizon, the optimal hedge ratio can be either positive or n...

This paper analyses the e¤ects of reducing unfunded social security in a closed economy that consists of a service sector and a commodity sector. It is shown that if old agents mainly demand labour intensive services, a modest decrease of the pay-as-you-go pension scheme still raises long-run utility as long as the economy is dynamically e¢cient. However, entirely privatising the social securit...

Active Unemployment Insurance The paper argues that a comprehensive activation strategy is called for – in both unemployment and disability insurance – to minimize the conflict between income insurance and work incentives and to prevent the economic crisis from causing a long-lasting decline in labor force participation. A review of recent empirical evidence, particularly from the Scandinavian ...

The mutual fund industry has experienced huge growth internationally, becoming one of the primary vehicles through which individuals and most institutions invest in capital markets. Thus, the evaluation of the performance of mutual funds has become a very interesting research topic both for academic researchers for managers of financial, banking and investment institutions. This paper proposes ...

This paper analyses the general equilibrium implications of reforming pay-as-you-go pension systems in an economy with heterogeneous agents, human capital investment and capital-skill complementarity. It shows that increasing funding delivers in the long run higher physical and human capital and therefore higher output, but also higher wage and income inequality. The latter affects preferences ...

Income Inequality, Mobility, and the Welfare State: A Political Economy Model In this paper, we set up a three-period stochastic overlapping generations model to analyze the implications of income inequality and mobility for demand for redistribution and social insurance. We model the size of two different public programs under the welfare state. We investigate bidimensional voting on the tax r...

This paper proposes a computationally efficient algorithm for quantifying the impact of interest-rate risk and longevity risk on the distribution of annuity values in the distant future. The algorithm simulates the state variables out to the end of the horizon period and then uses a Taylor series approximation to compute approximate annuity values at the end of that period, thereby avoiding a c...

The paper presents a model where public pensions are determined by majority voting. Voters differ by age and income. Moreover, life expectancy increases with income. Depending on the strength of the link between contributions and benefits, and the relationship between income and life expectancy, individually optimal tax rates may increase or decrease with income. If they decrease, high tax rate...

Abstract Portfolio performance measures using holdings data are panel regressions. The returns of a fund’s stocks regressed on its lagged portfolio weights. Stock fixed effects isolate average from time-series predictive ability. Control variables condition for fund the characteristics held. long-term drives some classical measures, while ability others. A “buy-and-hold drift,” where weights in...