East-West migration in Germany peaked at the beginning of the 90s although the average wage gap between Eastern and Western Germany continues to average about 25%. We analyze the propensity to migrate using microdata from the German Socioeconomic Panel. Fitting a parametric Generalized Linear...

Stochastic Volatility (SV) models are widely used in financial applications. To decide whether standard parametric restrictions are justified for a given dataset, a statistical test is required. In this paper, we develop such a test based on the linear state space representation. We provide a...

Daily returns of financial assets are frequently found to exhibit positive autocorrelation at lag 1. When specifying a linear AR(l) conditional mean, one may ask how this predictability affects option prices. We investigate the dependence of option prices on autoregressive dynamics under...

Based on daily VDAX data this paper analyzes the factors governing the movements of implied volatilities of options on the German stock index DAX. Using Principal Components Analysis over the sample period from 1996 to 1997, we derive common factors representing "shift" and "curvature" of the...

The analysis of diffusion processes in financial models is crucially dependent on the form of the drift and diffusion coefficient functions. A methodology is proposed for estimating and testing coefficient functions for ergodic diffusions that are not directly observable. It is based on...