Intergenerational Risk Sharing,Pensions, and Endogenous Labour Supply in General Equilibrium*

We show that a two‐tier pension system, with a pay‐as‐you‐go first tier and a fully funded, defined wage‐indexed second tier, can provide for optimal intergenerational risk‐sharing without distorting the labour supply, thereby achieving the first best. Other arrangements with a fully‐funded second tier fail to achieve the first best.     

Why do farmers behave as they do? Understanding compliance with rural, agricultural, and food attribute standards

Agricultural production experiences a shift in underlying institutions during the last years., Importance of private stakeholders like retailers, processors, consumers as well as tax payers is, emerging. Eligibility for single farm payments and marketing of products is linked to compliance with, diverse codes of practice and standards. Voluntary certification schemes are not only relevant with, respect to agriculture's traditional activity (i.e. food production), but is also highly relevant in case of, rural policies. Examples are the EU's agri-environmental schemes, aimed at preserving biodiversity, landscape elements, etc., which are characterized by voluntary participation and the contractual, commitment to apply certain standards. However, these relationships are highly characterized by, information asymmetries. Economic literature offers several approaches to analyse similar relations. The classical approach bases on the assumption of utility maximising agents that will comply with, rules as long as the net utility of compliance will be higher than the net utility of an offence. Recent, evidence challenges this result. Experiments show that people behave more honest than the classical, deterrence model predicts. Main objective of the paper is to compare the various approaches to explain, compliant behaviour. Additionally, an outlook for empirical applications of the theoretical framework, developed here is given to motivate further research. However, our outlook shows that the selection of, appropriate variables to analyse compliance empirically is open to debate.     

Last look

In over-the-counter markets, a trader typically sources indicative quotes from a number of competing liquidity providers, and then sends a deal request on the best available price for consideration by the originating liquidity provider. Due to the communication and processing latencies involved in this negotiation, and in a continuously evolving market, the price may have moved by the time the liquidity provider considers the trader’s request. At what point has the price moved too far away from the quote originally shown for the liquidity provider to reject the deal request? Or perhaps the request can still be accepted but only on a revised rate? ‘Last look’ is the process that makes this decision, i.e. it determines whether to accept—and if so at what rate—or reject a trader’s deal request subject to the constraints of an agreed trading protocol. In this paper, I study how the execution risk and transaction costs faced by the trader are influenced by the last look logic and choice of trading protocol. I distinguish between various ‘symmetric’ and ‘asymmetric’ last look designs and consider trading protocols that differ on whether, and if so to what extent, price improvements and slippage can be passed on to the trader. All this is done within a unified framework that allows for a detailed comparative analysis. I present two main findings. Firstly, the choice of last look design and trading protocol determines the degree of execution risk inherent in the process, but the effective transaction costs borne by the trader need not be affected by it. Secondly, when a trader adversely selects the liquidity provider she chooses to deal with, the distinction between the different symmetric and asymmetric last look designs fades and the primary driver of execution risk is the choice of trading protocol.     

Mobile nudging: Youth engagement with banking apps

Mobile-banking (m-banking) is of particular interest to banks seeking to sustain their market share because of m-banking’s role attracting and retaining customers, especially young ones. This article reports on a study that applies concepts from behavioural economics (BE) and ‘nudging’ with the objective of promoting young people’s ongoing engagement with m-banking applications (that is, software designed to run on mobile devices, or m-banking ‘apps’ in common parlance). Insights and ideas for new features or refinements for m-banking apps were generated from discussions with a large class of senior marketing students, and then presented to m-banking managers and app designers to refine and to select two features for each of five constructs from BE: loss aversion, power of now, scarcity value, chunking and choice architecture. The relative desirability of these 10 m-banking features was investigated via a survey involving a pairwise-ranking exercise that was completed by 257 young m-banking consumers. Overall, the research reveals that m-banking app design can benefit from fundamentally different approaches (relative to traditional methodologies) that prioritise intuitive interfaces over non-intuitive-based designs, and, in particular, that BE and nudging can supply valuable insights and ideas for new features or refinements.     

Monetary and fiscal policy interactions in a micro-founded model of a monetary union

This paper analyzes in detail the mechanisms behind fiscal stabilization policy and the role of policy commitment in a micro-founded New-Keynesian model of a two-country monetary union, which is hit by supply shocks. We also explore the determinants of the gains from fiscal stabilization. While monetary policy with identical union members is concerned with stabilizing the union-wide economy, fiscal policy aims at stabilizing inflation differences and the terms of trade. Besides exploring optimal policies, we also consider monetary and fiscal rules. We study these rules both under coordination and non-coordination by the fiscal authorities.     

Representation of Developments in Labour Market Research

A knowledge graph is a kind of semantic network representing some scientific theory. The paper describes the state of art in this field and addresses a number of problems that has not been solved yet. These are: implicit relations, strength of (causal) relations, and conditions. Concepts might be too broad or complex to be used properly, directions for solving this problem are explored. The solutions are applied to a knowledge graph in the field of labour markets.     

High-dimensional covariance forecasting for short intra-day horizons

Asset return covariances at intra-day horizons are known to tend towards zero due to market microstructure effects. Thus, traders who simply scale their daily covariance forecast to match their trading horizon are likely to over-estimate the actual experienced asset dependence. In this paper, some of the key challenges are discussed that are encountered when forecasting high-dimensional covariance matrices for short intra-day horizons. Based on a novel evaluation methodology, and extensive empirical analysis, specific recommendations are made regarding model design and data sampling.     

Price signatures

Price signatures are statistical measurements that aim to detect systematic patterns in price dynamics localised around the point of trade execution. They are particularly useful in electronic trading because they uncover market dynamics, strategy characteristics, implicit execution costs, or counter-party trading behaviours that are often hard to identify, in part due to the vast amounts of data involved and the typically low signal to noise ratio. Because the signature summarises price dynamics over a specified time interval, it constitutes a curve (rather than a point estimate) and because of potential overlap in the price paths it has a non-trivial dependence structure which complicates statistical inference. In this paper, I show how recent advances in functional data analysis can be applied to study the properties of these signatures. To account for data dependence, I analyse and develop resampling-based bootstrap methodologies that enable reliable statistical inference and hypothesis testing. I illustrate the power of this approach using a number of case studies taken from a live trading environment in the over-the-counter currency market. I demonstrate that functional data analysis of price signatures can be used to distinguish between internalising and externalising liquidity providers in a highly effective data driven manner. This in turn can help traders to selectively engage with liquidity providers whose risk management style best aligns with their execution objectives.