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ECONOMICDYNAMICS  April 2005

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Subject:

[EconomicDynamics] April 2005 Newsletter

From:

Christian Zimmermann <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Christian Zimmermann <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 07:47:41 -0400

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                 The EconomicDynamics Newsletter

                  Volume 6, Issue 2, April 2005

A free electronic supplement to the Review of Economic Dynamics
distributed through the EconomicDynamics mailing list and 
also available on the web at http://www.EconomicDynamics.org/

In this issue:

- The Research Agenda: Dirk Krueger and Fabrizio Perri on
   Risk Sharing across Households, Generations and Countries
- EconomicDynamics Interviews Ellen McGrattan on Business
   Cycle Accounting and Stock Market Valuation
- Society Economic Dynamics: 2005 Meetings
- Review of Economic Dynamics: Letter from the Coordinating
   Editor 
- Web review: QM&RBC at 10 Years
- Review: Lengwiler's Microfoundations of Financial Economics
- Impressum 
- Subscribing/Unsubscribing/Address change

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Research Agenda: Dirk Krueger and Fabrizio Perri on Risk 
Sharing across Households, Generations and Countries

Dirk Krueger is Professor of Economics, especially 
Macroeconomics at Goethe University Frankfurt (Germany). 
Fabrizio Perri is Associate Professor of Economics at the 
Stern School of Business, New York University and currently 
visiting the Research Department at the Federal Reserve Bank 
of Minneapolis. They have both worked, often in 
collaboration, on issues of consumption risk sharing, 
incomplete markets and distributions of income and 
consumption.

Risk is pervasive in macroeconomics and the question that 
our research has focused on most is whether, how and to what 
extent this risk is shared across households or groups of 
households. Since the risk that a typical household in the 
macro economy faces is large the welfare impact of sharing 
it can be substantial. We now briefly describe our research 
in this area, carried out jointly and with separate 
coauthors.

Risk sharing across households

It is a well known fact that the distribution of earnings 
across households is very dispersed. For us, it is crucial 
to understand whether these earnings differences across 
households are completely determined at the beginning of the 
working life of household members (say by their education, 
skill or endowments) or whether they are the results of 
idiosyncratic earnings shocks realized during the working 
life of the members of the household. Recent research (see 
for example Storesletten, Telmer and Yaron, 2004) seems to 
indicate that these types of shocks (which we will call 
earnings risk) are persistent, large and they can be 
responsible for as much as 50% of the cross sectional 
variation in earnings. To get a sense of their magnitude, 
note that household earnings shocks have the same order of 
persistence as business cycles shocks, but that their 
percentage volatility has been estimated to be roughly 20 
times as large as the percentage volatility of business 
cycles shocks! Given the sheer size of household earnings 
risk it is relevant to understand how and to what extent 
this risk can be shared across households, or to what extent 
households are at least self-insured.

Theory

One useful benchmark model to assess the extent of risk 
sharing is the Arrow-Debreu complete markets model. In that 
model households have access to a full set of state 
contingent securities for every possible realization of 
their income so they can fully insure against earnings risk. 
Several authors have argued (see for example Attanasio and 
Davis, 1996) that this model overstates the actual risk 
sharing possibilities available to households, by showing 
that the complete markets model cannot explain the joint 
distribution of household earnings and consumption observed 
in US cross sectional data. Therefore our research on this 
issue has focused on two popular classes of models that 
imply only partial risk-sharing or self-insurance of 
earnings risk.

In the first model (which we refer to as the standard 
incomplete markets model, SIM) households cannot explicitly 
share risk with one another, but rather can only self-insure 
by trading a single, uncontingent bond, potentially subject 
to borrowing constraints. The second model (which we refer 
to as the debt constraint model, DCM) follows the work of 
Kehoe and Levine (1993) and has been further developed by 
Kocherlakota (1996) and Alvarez and Jermann (2000). In this 
framework a full set of state contingent contracts is 
available to all agents, but that intertemporal contracts 
can only be enforced by exclusion from future intertemporal 
trade. Since exclusion from credit markets is not infinitely 
costly, in some states of the world agents might find 
optimal not to repay their debts and suffer the consequences 
of exclusion from financial markets. This possibility 
endogenously restricts the extent to which each contingent 
asset can be traded and thus limits risk sharing. This is an 
appealing feature as the extent of risk sharing is not 
exogenously assumed but depends on the fundamentals of the 
model (i.e. preferences and technology); for some 
fundamentals the DCM model generates complete risk sharing, 
while for different fundamentals the model generate only 
partial or no risk sharing at all.

Our main theoretical contribution has been the analysis of 
the DCM model with a continuum of agents. In Krueger and 
Perri (1999) we show how to characterize and compute 
stationary equilibria of such a model, using the dual 
approach developed by Atkeson and Lucas (1992) for private 
information economies. The consumption dynamics mirrors the 
two main assumptions of this model: a complete set of 
contingent consumption claims and constraints on allocations 
that require agents to weakly prefer continuation in the 
market to reverting to autarky. Since it is agents with 
currently high income whose constraint is binding, agents 
with high income growth exhibit strong consumption growth, 
whereas agents with low income are unconstrained and have 
their consumption decline at a common rate as implied by a 
perfect consumption insurance Euler equation (we show in the 
paper that the equilibrium interest rate lies strictly below 
the time discount factor, making consumption drift down over 
time when unconstrained).

The crucial friction in this model is the inability of 
households to commit to repay their state-contingent debt, 
leading to endogenously determined borrowing constraints 
whose size depends on how the consequences of default are 
determined. In the standard limited commitment model this is 
specified as having to consume the autarkic allocation from 
the point of default on. While this is motivated by 
empirical bankruptcy procedures (and can be relaxed by 
admitting only temporary exclusion or saving after default, 
as in Krueger and Perri, 1999), it remains true that the 
consequence of default is specified essentially exogenous to 
the model. In Krueger and Uhlig (2005) we endogenize the 
outside option via competition. The outside option of the 
agent after default is determined by the best consumption 
insurance contract a household can obtain from a competing 
financial intermediary, subject to the constraint that the 
intermediary has to at least break even with the contract. 
What we also show in that paper is that, even though the 
extent of consumption insurance depends on the outside 
option, the consumption dynamics is essentially the same as 
in the DCM model.

Bringing the theory to the data

The workhorse for our empirical analysis is the Consumer 
Expenditure (CE) Survey which reports data on earnings, 
hours and detailed consumption expenditures for a fairly 
large (5000-8000) repeated cross section of US households 
from 1980 to 2004. One important object we can compute from 
the data set is within-group income inequality, that is, 
inequality after controlling for fixed characteristics of 
the households such as sex, race and education: a statistic 
of this residual inequality (the variance of logs, say) is 
the best, if still imperfect, measure of earnings risk we 
can obtain from the cross sections of the CE.

One striking fact that emerges from the CE is that, over the 
last 25 years, within-group earnings inequality has 
increased substantially while within-group consumption 
inequality increased only very modestly. This fact suggests 
that US households were able to insulate fairly well their 
consumption profiles from idiosyncratic earnings risk. In 
Krueger and Perri (2002) we ask whether the two models 
discussed above are able to explain this fact, in a 
quantitatively satisfactory way. We first estimate a 
time-varying process for earnings risk. Following a large 
previous literature we model earning risk as the sum of two 
components: a very persistent autoregressive process and a 
purely transitory shock. We estimate this process on CE data 
(we are able to identify the two components due to a short 
panel dimension of the CE) and find that about half of the 
increase in earnings risk is driven by the persistent 
component and half by the transitory component. We then feed 
this process into both models and find that both predict an 
increase in consumption inequality substantially smaller 
than the increase in earnings inequality. Comparing models 
to consumption data we find that the DCM only slightly 
understates the increase in within-group consumption 
inequality while the SIM overstates it.

The DCM predicts very little increase in consumption 
inequality for two reasons: first households have a full set 
of state-contingent securities available so they can insure 
well against shocks even if they are persistent. Second the 
increased earnings risk makes defaulting and living in 
financial autarky more costly and thus borrowing constraints 
(which are the only limits to risk sharing) expand as a 
response. In other words, the increase in earnings risk 
makes risk sharing more valuable and the DCM predicts that 
credit/insurance markets will develop in order to provide 
more of it.

The reason why also the SIM predicts a more modest increase 
in consumption inequality, compared to the increase in 
income inequality, is that even with an uncontingent bond 
agents can effectively self-insure against the temporary 
earnings shocks so that the increase in earnings risk due to 
the increase of the variance of temporary shocks does not 
translate into consumption. This point was also made by 
Heathcote, Storesletten and Violante (2004).

Another important difference between the two models is the 
implication for consumer credit. The development of 
financial markets generated by the DCM implies a sizable 
increase in consumer credit that matches up well with what 
we observe in US data. In the SIM model, on the other hand, 
the increase in risk implies that households want to 
accumulate more assets for self insurance and make less use 
of credit lines. Thus along this dimension that model is 
less consistent with data as it generates a (small) decline 
in consumer credit.

In Krueger and Perri (2005) we evaluate the two models along 
a different dimension. We ask directly how household 
consumption responds to earnings shocks, a feature 
empirically examined by Dynarski and Gruber (1997) with CE 
data. Our results mirror the ones derived in Krueger and 
Perri (2002): relative to the data the DCM understates the 
consumption response to income shocks while the SIM 
overpredicts it.

From our work we would draw as final assessment of the two 
models that the DCM model has the appealing feature that 
risk sharing is endogenous and responds to changes in 
fundamentals. It may, however, overstate the true insurance 
possibilities of households, due to the presence of a full 
set of state contingent securities. On the other hand, the 
SIM model probably understates the ability households have 
to insulate their consumption from income shocks and does 
not capture the fact that credit and insurance markets may 
evolve in response to change in fundamentals, such as the 
stochastic income process households face. We conjecture 
that a model that combines aspect of both models has the 
most chances of perfectly capturing the empirical facts we 
have focused on (note that Blundell, Preston and Pistaferri, 
2004 come to similar conclusion by following a different 
methodology).

Welfare and policy implications

After having explored the positive consequences of an 
increase in earnings risk for consumption we were ultimately 
interested in the welfare implications of this increase. And 
if the welfare costs of this increase are large, is there 
something economic policy can do to reduce them? The two 
models discussed above provide very different answers to 
these questions.

In the DCM, in principle the endogenous increase in risk 
sharing can mitigate the adverse welfare consequences of 
increased earnings risk. Actually in Krueger and Perri 
(1999, 2002) we show that there can be situations in which 
the increase in risk sharing opportunities triggered by the 
increase in earnings risk is so large that overall 
consumption risk falls, and welfare rises. In those 
situations economic policies intended to reduce income 
volatility (such as unemployment insurance) may have the 
perverse effect of increasing consumption inequality, 
because those policies may crowd out the private provision 
of consumption insurance more than one-to-one. This 
crowding-out mechanism is similar to the effect at work in 
Attanasio and Rios-Rull (2001).

On the other hand in the context of the SIM an increase in 
earnings risk is always welfare reducing as self-insurance 
can only partially offset it. As a consequence policies that 
reduce earnings risk are welfare improving. For example, in 
Conesa and Krueger (2005) we find that in the SIM the 
optimal income tax code is likely to be progressive because 
it provides a partial substitute for missing private 
insurance markets.

Because theory does not give an unambiguous answer to the 
welfare question, in Krueger and Perri (2004) we use a more 
empirically guided approach. More concretely, we ask how 
much would a household in 1973 have been willing to pay to 
avoid the increase in earnings dispersion that has taken 
place from 1973 to 2002. In order to do so we first estimate 
stochastic processes for household consumption and hours 
worked that are consistent with the evolution of the 
empirical cross-sectional distributions and with one year 
consumption mobility matrices from the CE. For consumption 
we also estimate separate stochastic processes for the 
between- and within-group component of dispersion, thus 
capturing both the change in consumption risk and the change 
in permanent consumption dispersion. Consistently with our 
previous work we find that the increase in consumption risk 
has been very modest and thus it has had a very mild welfare 
impact. On the other hand the increase in between-group 
dispersion, although not extremely large either, has a much 
more persistent nature and thus more important welfare 
consequences. To quantify these we employ a standard 
lifetime utility framework, together with our estimates of 
the stochastic processes for the relevant variables. We find 
that the welfare losses for a substantial fraction of the US 
population amount to 2 to 3 percent of lifetime consumption 
and that for some groups (in particular households with low 
education) the cost can be as large as 6% of lifetime 
consumption. Heathcote, Storesletten and Violante (2004, 
2005) use incomplete markets models to assess the welfare 
consequences of the recent increase in wage inequality and 
find numbers comparable to ours. Their approach also 
captures the interesting effect that, in a model with 
endogenous labor supply, an increase in wage dispersion 
raises earnings risk but also raises average earnings, so 
that the negative welfare impact of higher risk is further 
mitigated.

Risk sharing across generations

If wages and returns to capital are imperfectly correlated, 
then there is scope to share aggregate wage and capital 
income risk across generations. Young households derive most 
of their income from labor, whereas old households finance 
old-age consumption mostly via income generated from their 
assets. If financial markets are incomplete in that 
households cannot trade a full set of contingent claims on 
aggregate uncertainty, then a policy such as social security 
that provides old, asset rich households a claim to labor 
income, may endow households with welcome risk 
diversification. In Krueger and Kubler (2002, 2004) we show 
that even if an economy is dynamically efficient in the 
sense of Samuelson's seminal work on the Overlapping 
Generations model, the introduction of social security may 
constitute a Pareto-improving reform because it helps to 
achieve a better allocation of wage/return risk across 
households. But we also show that for this argument to work 
quantitatively, shocks to private asset returns have to be 
as big as return risk to the US stock market, fairly 
uncorrelated with wage risk and households have to be very 
risk averse and fairly willing to intertemporally substitute 
consumption. High risk aversion (a coefficient of relative 
risk aversion of at least 15) is needed for households to 
value better risk allocation, while high intertemporal 
elasticity of substitution is required to keep in check the 
capital-crowding out effect of social security in general 
equilibrium. We conclude that, for a realistically 
calibrated OLG economy the intergenerational risk-sharing 
effects alone are unlikely to provide a normative argument 
for the introduction of social security. However, Conesa and 
Krueger (1999) argue that the positive intragenerational 
insurance and redistribution effects from the current US 
social security system may be sufficient to make a 
transition from the current system to no social security 
undesirable for a majority of households currently alive.

Risk Sharing across countries

However, some early research (Backus, Kehoe and Kydland, 
1992) has shown that, in the context of a standard one-good 
complete markets international business cycles model (IRBC), 
complete cross-country risk sharing is not consistent with 
basic business cycles facts, suggesting that international 
risk sharing might be limited. In Kehoe and Perri (2002) we 
analyze whether limited enforcement of international 
contracts could be responsible for limited risk sharing. We 
characterize and solve the IRBC model with limited 
enforcement and find that this imperfection can greatly 
reduce the amount of international risk sharing in the 
model. We also find that, although the IRBC model with 
limited enforcement can account for business cycle facts 
much better than the complete markets model, discrepancies 
remain between theory and data.

In some recent work (Heathcote and Perri, 2005) we are 
exploring this issue in the context of a richer model, 
namely the IRBC model with two goods and with taste shocks. 
In that context we find that a high degree of international 
risk-sharing is consistent with several observations for 
developed economies, especially in the last 10-15 years. In 
particular for this period, it is consistent with most 
international business cycle facts (including the relatively 
low cross-country correlation of consumption), with the 
proportion of foreign asset in country portfolios (the 
international diversification puzzle) and with the low 
observed correlation of the real exchange rate with relative 
consumption. This suggests that one of the roles of 
financial globalization (which has happened in the last 
15-20 years) has been to improve international risk sharing 
among developed countries.

What Next

In our empirical work on inequality a crucial component for 
the evolution of consumption inequality are service flows 
from consumer durables. Our empirical results also suggest 
that these services make up a growing share of consumption 
of households. This motivates us to explore an extension of 
the limited commitment model that explicitly incorporates 
consumer durables and collateralized debt, in the same 
spirit as Fernandez-Villaverde and Krueger (2002). The asset 
pricing implications of such a model have already 
successfully been explored by Lustig and van Nieuwerburgh 
(2004). We intend to use this model to assess to what extent 
relaxed collateral constraints and improved risk sharing can 
affect the dynamics of aggregate expenditures on durables 
over the business cycle, and more concretely, whether these 
factors have had role in the decline of US Business cycles 
volatility that many researchers have documented

Selected references to the papers mentioned are available in 
the web version of this newsletter at
http://www.EconomicDynamics.org/newsletter.htm

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
EconomicDynamics Interviews Ellen McGrattan on Business 
Cycle Accounting and Stock Market Valuation

Ellen McGrattan is Monetary Advisor at the Research 
Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and 
Adjunct Professor of Economics at the University of 
Minneapolis. She has worked on a large number of topics, 
such as business cycles, equity premiums, optimal debt and 
solution methods.

EconomicDynamics: With V.V. Chari and Pat Kehoe, you show 
that the driving forces in business cycle model are well 
summarized by efficiency, labor and investment wedges. Using 
the Great Depression and the 1982 recession in the US, you 
argue that investment wedges are not relevant. In work with 
Prescott, you demonstrate that the recent stock market boom 
can be traced to changes in dividend taxation. Are these two 
result not contradictory?

Ellen McGrattan: No they are not contradictory.

But to explain that requires some background. In 'Business 
Cycle Accounting', we propose a methodology---one that is, 
in my opinion, much better than the SVAR methodology---to 
isolate promising classes of business cycle theories. There 
are two parts. The first is to show that a large class of 
models are equivalent to a prototype growth model with 
time-varying "wedges" resembling time-varying productivity, 
labor income tax rates, investment tax rates, and government 
consumption. The second is the accounting part: measure 
wedges using data and feed them into the prototype growth 
model to determine their contributions to aggregate 
fluctutations. We find that the investment "wedge" (which 
looks just like a time-varying tax rate on investment) does 
not contribute significantly to aggregate fluctuations. 
Therefore, models in which frictions manifest themselves as 
investment wedges are not promising for studying business 
cycles. These include those with credit market frictions 
such as Bernanke and Gertler (1989).

In the paper with Ed entitled 'Taxes, Regulations, and the 
Value of US and UK corporations', we consider the dramatic 
secular changes in the value of US and UK corporate equities 
that occurred between the 1960s and 1990s, when there was 
little change in corporate capital stocks, after-tax 
corporate earnings, or corporate net debt. In particular, we 
ask what growth theory predicts for equities given estimates 
of taxes and productive capital stocks. There were two 
innovations that we made that are worth noting. The first 
innovation was a method to estimate the value of corporate 
intangible capital, which is not included in measures of 
productive capital but adds to the value of corporations. 
Our estimate for intangible corporate capital is large, 
roughly 2/3 as big as tangible corporate capital. The second 
innovation was to bring public finance back into finance and 
relate the large movements in equity values to large 
movements in the effective tax rate on corporate 
distributions (e.g., dividends). A key proposition is that a 
decline in the tax rate on corporate distributions implies a 
rise in stock values and (if revenues are rebated back) no 
change in the reproducible cost of capital. This is what we 
see in the data.

Now let me go back to your question about possible 
inconsistencies between Chari-Kehoe-McGrattan and 
McGrattan-Prescott. One reason they are not inconsistent is 
the key tax rate for MP is the tax rate on corporate 
distributions. The level of the tax rate on distributions 
does not enter the dynamic Euler equation, only the growth 
rate if it is time-varying. If the variation in tax rates 
quarter by quarter is not large, then the implied investment 
wedge in big downturns is relatively small and not 
particularly relevant for cyclical behavior. MP focus on 
secular change over 40 or 50 years.
ED: Again with V.V. Chari and Pat Kehoe, you have recently 
worked on sudden stops and how financial crises alone cannot 
trigger drops in output. In fact, such a crisis would 
increase output. What critical ingredient is our basic 
intuition missing here?

EM: The basic intuition of the paper is simple. Using the 
idea in 'Business Cycle Accounting,' we show an equivalence 
between equilibrium outcomes in a small open economy and a 
closed-economy growth model. A rise in net exports in the 
small open economy (a sudden stop) is equivalent to a rise 
in government spending in the closed economy. We know what 
happens when government spending goes up in the closed 
economy model: output rises. Thus, we show that sudden 
stops, by themselves, do not lead to decreases in output. 
They lead to increases. To account for both sudden stops and 
output drops, one needs some other friction.

I think what the literature has missed is that the sudden 
stop is not the primary shock but rather a symptom of 
domestic problems, bad policies, or distortions. If one 
treats it as the primary shock, the economy will look just 
like one that had a big increase in government spending 
(since government spending and net exports enter the 
resource constraint in the same way). Researchers should be 
thinking about the driving forces behind the sudden stops.
ED: With your business cycle accounting procedure, you 
determine what proportion of the output volatility can be 
accounted for by the various wedges. But is it fitting to 
call this business accounting? We all learned that the 
business cycle is not just characterized by output 
volatility, but also by relative volatilities and 
comovements. In other words, isn't reducing all possible 
shocks and frictions to three or four wedges 
oversimplifying?

EM: We don't just look at output -- we decompose labor and 
investment as well. And we are (in a revision) putting in 
details of relative volatilities and comovements because a 
referee was interested in comparing the results to other 
papers in the business cycle literature.

Because the wedges are correlated, there are subtle issues 
about exactly how one should attribute total variances to 
each shock. We acknowledge that -- but it is something one 
can't avoid. We do compare our realization-based accounting 
procedure to spectral decompositions. The two ways of 
accounting for the business cycle are both informative in my 
opinion.

Selected references to the papers mentioned are available in 
the web version of this newsletter at
http://www.EconomicDynamics.org/newsletter.htm

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Review of Economic Dynamics: Letter from the Coordinating 
Editor

The Review of Economic Dynamics is now in its 8th year and 
going strong. In fact, the number of submissions received so 
far this year is almost double the number received by this 
point last year. And, I think the average quality of our 
submissions has been increasing rapidly as well. There is no 
doubt that the success of the journal has followed hand in 
hand with the incredible success of the Society. The number 
and average quality of submissions to the SED Annual Meeting 
has also been growing substantially each year.

But, continuing growth and success requires that new 
editorial blood be introduced on a regular basis. I began 
serving as Coordinating Editor of RED in the summer of 2000, 
when Tom Cooley needed to step down after seeing the journal 
through its first critical years. It is now my turn to step 
down in order to move on to other activities.

I am please to announce that Narayana Kocherlakota will be 
taking over as Coordinating Editor of RED beginning this 
summer. Of course, Narayana is well known to members of the 
Society and anyone who follows research on economic 
dynamics. He has been an Editor of RED since 2003 after 
serving as an Associate Editor beginning in 2002. He has 
also served as Program Chair for the 2002 Annual Meeting 
held in New York and gave a plenary lecture at last year's 
meeting in Florence, Italy. His research contributions are 
unusually broad and have spanned a wide range of theoretical 
and applied topics, including ones related to dynamic public 
finance, monetary economics, dynamic games, real business 
cycle theory, and macro-econometrics. I feel extremely 
fortunate to be turning the management of this journal over 
to such qualified and capable hands.

Over the next few months, we will be adding some additional 
Associate Editors to replace several who have recently 
stepped down. Outgoing Associate Editors include Jordi Galí, 
Per Krusell, Aldo Rustichini, and Robert Shimer. I have 
enjoyed working with each of these editors and the journal 
has benefited substantially from their efforts. I want to 
take this opportunity to publicly thank them for their 
valuable service to RED.

In closing, I want to urge all of you to submit your work to 
RED. Instructions for submitting online can be found at 
http://ees.elsevier.com/red/.

Gary Hansen 
RED Coordinating Editor

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Society Economic Dynamics: 2005 Meetings

The SED 2005 Meetings in Budapest on June 23-25 are the 
first to be held in Eastern Europe. A cocktail party the 
first night, held in the Hungarian Academy of the Sciences 
building along the picturesque Danube River, will see Robert 
Lucas presenting a tribute to Nobel prize winners Edward 
Prescott and Finn Kydland. The Europa River Boat will cruise 
the Danube with participants for the Conference Dinner on 
Saturday night. Paper sessions are to be held at George 
Soros's Central European University, with plenary sessions 
in the nearby Hungarian Academy building. Everything is 
centrally located in Pest near to the Danube, and directly 
across from the famous Castle district in Buda. Sponsors are 
the Hungarian National Bank and the CIB commercial bank.

Details are available at 
http://www.EconomicDynamics.org/currentSED.htm.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Web review: QM&RBC at 10 Years

Launched in June 1995, the Quantitative Macroeconomics & 
Real Business Cycle was one of the very first topical web 
sites in Economics. At that time, the web was little 
organized and in fact still unknown to most. The QM&RBC web 
site thus helped organize the material already available on 
the web and contributed some of its own as BibTex files of a 
comprehensive bibliography, data and papers.

Since then, most people have learned how to find material on 
the web, most researchers now have a homepage, and the 
profession is much better organized in disseminating its 
efforts through the Internet. Thus, in ten years, the value 
added of the QM&RBC has shifted. Instead of showing that 
there is something out there, the focus is now on sorting 
and presenting the most interesting contributions. The 
bibliography and conference announcements are now selective.

In addition, the web site is now in the midst of a drive to 
collect computer codes that can replicate many of the 
important papers of the literature, on top of the various 
tools for solving standard models. As of this writing, 125 
pieces of code are assembled. Not only does this allow to 
have all this code conveniently in one place, it also 
preserves them from being lost.

In the age of Google, there is still a place for topical web 
sites in academics. QM&RBC can be found at 
http://dge.repec.org/.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Review: Lengwiler's Microfoundations of Financial Economics

Microfoundations of Financial Economics, An Introduction to 
General Equilibrium Asset Pricing
by Yvan Lengwiler

This textbook is written for Masters or PhD students in 
Finance and Macroeconomics and builds the classic theories 
of financial economics from the ground up. Starting with 
contigents claim makets and the welfare theorems, the book 
gradually builds equilibrium concepts and different 
representations of risk. It covers the basic theories, CAPM, 
CCAPM, and dynamic trading. The main empirical puzzles are 
exhibited along with the main attempts to explaim them.

This book can be a great asset for PhD students that are 
overwhelmed by asset pricing as it is covered in, say, 
Ljungqvist and Sargent and need a less concise presentation. 
In this sense, it nicely complements the more advanced 
textbooks. It also makes asset pricing accessible to even 
moderately quantitatively inclined MBA or terminal Masters 
students. Yvan Lengwiler produced a nice addition to recent 
publications that bridge the gap between undergraduate and 
advanced PhD textbooks.

"Microfoundations of Financial Economics" is published by 
Princeton University Press.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Impressum

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