Determinants of card payments

Although the development of the card payment system allows for lowering the costs of money circulation and thereby leads to significant economic gains, relatively small amount of research has been dedicated to the analysis of the determinants of this development. Therefore, the aim of the article is to seek cross-country determinants of retail card payments focusing on trust in the system. The article concentrates on two econometric models. One is constructed with the use of representative population survey data for Poland, the other is based on panel data from the EU countries in the years 2000–2012.     

Discrete-time risk sensitive portfolio optimization with proportional transaction costs

In this paper we consider a discrete-time risk sensitive portfolio optimization over a long time horizon with proportional transaction costs. We show that within the log-return i.i.d. framework the solution to a suitable Bellman equation exists under minimal assumptions and can be used to characterize the optimal strategies for both risk-averse and risk-seeking cases. Moreover, using numerical examples, we show how a Bellman equation analysis can be used to construct or refine optimal trading strategies in the presence of transaction costs.     

Disagreement in Consumer Inflation Expectations

By carefully matching the data sets from the Michigan Survey of Consumers with the Survey of Professional Forecasters, we show that there exists substantial heterogeneity in the propensity of U.S. households to learn from experts in forming inflation expectations. Additional results for a group of European economies broadly confirm this observation. We advance an extended version of the sticky-information model to analyze disagreement in consumer inflation expectations. Besides differences in consumers' propensities to learn, disagreement in our model arises from heterogeneity in consumers' fundamental inflation and past expectations and experts' different views about future inflation.     

Demographics,Monetary Policy,and the Zero Lower Bound

We develop a New Keynesian life-cycle model to assess the importance of population aging for monetary policy. The model successfully matches the age profiles of consumption-savings decisions made by European households. It implies that demographic trends contribute significantly to the decline of the natural rate of interest (NRI) and potential output growth, and exacerbate the risk of hitting the zero lower bound (ZLB), given the current inflation targets. Under a realistic assumption that the central bank updates its estimates of the NRI only with some lag, aging may additionally lead to a sizable and persistent deflationary bias, elevating the ZLB risk even further.