The flow of information between futures and spot prices may vary over time, in particular during periods of stress. This article analyses the information content of the Bund Future and German government bonds during 1998 and test whether it is constant over time. The use of high-frequency data...

In this paper we investigate the volatility structure of the German stock market index DAX and its constituents. Using a recently developed test, we find a volatility break in 1997. Interestingly, not only is the volatility higher after 1997 but the volatility persistence also increased. That...

The turbulences in the international financial markets during the summer and autumn of 1998 put the price formation and liquidity provision mechanism in many markets under severe strain. As part of the large-scale portfolio rebalancing that took place, investors shifted a large part of their...

We report results on the ex ante predictability of monthly excess stock returns in Germany using real-time and revised macroeconomic data. Our real-time macroeconomic data cover the period 1994-2005. We report three results. 1) Real-time macroeconomic data did not contribute much to ex ante...

We compared forecasts of stock market volatility based on real-time and revised macroeconomic data. To this end, we used a new dataset on monthly real-time macroeconomic variables for Germany. The dataset covers the period 1994-2005. We used a statistical, a utility-based, and an options-based...

Density forecasts have become quite important in economics and finance. For example, such forecasts play a central role in modern financial risk management techniques like Value at Risk. This paper suggests a regression based density forecast evaluation framework as a simple alternative to other...

The present paper studies dependencies between European stock markets when returns are unusually large, using daily data on stock market indices for Germany, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands and Italy from 1973 to 2001. Dependency is measured by the conditional probability of an...

The literature on the tail behaviour of asset prices focuses mainly on the foreign exchange and stock markets, with only a few papers dealing with bonds or bond futures. The present paper addresses this omission. We focus on three questions: (i) Are heavy tails a relevant feature of the...

In this paper, we use a modified concept of Granger-(non)causality in reconsidering the negative correlation between stock returns and inflation known in the literature as stock return-inflation puzzle. Based on the quarterly data for Germany including stock returns, inflation rates and growth...