Is there a link between pension-fund assets and economic growth? - A cross-country study

Debate over superiority of pension funding over pay-as-you-go links notably to the question whether funding improves economic performance sufficiently to generate additional resources to meet the needs of an ageing population. To address this issue, we design a modified Cobb-Douglas production function with pension assets as a shift factor, and investigate the direct link between pension assets and economic growth employing a dataset covering up to 38 countries, using a variety of appropriate econometric methods. We find positive results for both OECD countries and Emerging Market Economies (EMEs), with consistent evidence for a larger effect for EMEs than OECD countries

Does funding of pensions stimulate economic growth?

Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press.Debate over superiority of pension funding over pay-as-you-go links notably to the question whether funding improves economic performance sufficiently to generate additional resources to meet the needs of an ageing population. To address this issue, we design a modified Cobb–Douglas production function with pension assets as a shift factor, and investigate the direct link between pension assets and economic growth employing a dataset covering up to 38 countries, using a variety of appropriate econometric methods. We find positive results for both OECD countries and Emerging Market Economies (EMEs), with consistent evidence for a larger effect for EMEs than OECD countries

Interpretable Subgroup Discovery in Treatment Effect Estimation with Application to Opioid Prescribing Guidelines

The dearth of prescribing guidelines for physicians is one key driver of the current opioid epidemic in the United States. In this work, we analyze medical and pharmaceutical claims data to draw insights on characteristics of patients who are more prone to adverse outcomes after an initial synthetic opioid prescription. Toward this end, we propose a generative model that allows discovery from observational data of subgroups that demonstrate an enhanced or diminished causal effect due to treatment. Our approach models these sub-populations as a mixture distribution, using sparsity to enhance interpretability, while jointly learning nonlinear predictors of the potential outcomes to better adjust for confounding. The approach leads to human-interpretable insights on discovered subgroups, improving the practical utility for decision suppor

Methodological advances in the assessment of equilibrium exchange rates

This paper reviews three different concepts of equilibrium exchange rates that are widely used in policy analysis and constitute the backbone of the IMF CGER assessment: the Macroeconomic Balance, the External Sustainability and the reduced form approaches. We raise a number of econometric issues that were previously neglected, proposing some methodological advances to address them. The first issue relates to the presence of model uncertainty in deriving benchmarks for the current account, introducing Bayesian averaging techniques as a solution. The second issue reveals that, if one considers all the sets of plausible identification schemes, the uncertainty surrounding export and import exchange rate elasticities is large even at longer horizons. The third issue discusses the uncertainty associated to the estimation of a reduced form relationship for the real exchange rate, concluding that inference can be improved by panel estimation. The fourth and final issue addresses the presence of strong and weak cross section dependence in panel estimation, suggesting which panel estimators one could use in this case. Overall, the analysis puts forward a number of innovative solutions in dealing with the large uncertainties surrounding equilibrium exchange rate estimates. JEL Classification: F31, F32, F41current account, Equilibrium exchange rates, global imbalances, IMF CGER methodologies, trade elasticities