In the discussion about the structure and evolution of financial systems, the US separated and the German universal banking system are commonly considered as antipodes. This paper shows that the differences in the role of banks in these two economies are less pronounced than the conventional...

This paper presents an online-experiment on overconfidence in the context of financial markets. Our subject pool consists of institutional investors, investment advisors and individual investors, all of them being registered users of a large online platform for market sentiment data. Due to...

A fall in house prices due to a change in its fundamental value redistributes wealth from those long housing (for whom the fundamental value of the house they own exceeds the present discounted value of their planned future consumption of housing services) to those short housing. In a closed...

The paper starts with a short survey on the main ideas of portfolio theory. Based on this, mean-variance efficient portfolios (stock as well as bond portfolios) for German investors of different degrees of risk aversion are constructed. It is shown that for them international diversification of...

The economics profession appears to have been unaware of the long build-up to the current worldwide financial crisis and to have significantly underestimated its dimensions once it started to unfold. In our view, this lack of understanding is due to a misallocation of research efforts in...

Bond as well as stock portfolios of German investors are compared to the respective mean-variance-efficient portfolios. It is found that independent of the investors' degree of risk aversion, German investors' portfolios deviate significantly from the mean-variance-efficient ones, especially the...

In the aftermath of the Great Recession and during the debt crisis in the euro area yields on German federal bonds have been exceptionally low. This analysis tries to calculate the profits that the federal government makes due to the low yields. The interest payments that are due to emissions of...

We analyze the stock prices of the S&P market from 1987 to 2012 with the covariance matrix of the firm returns determined in time windows of several years. The eigenvector belonging to the leading eigenvalue (market) exhibits in its long term time dependence a phase transition with an order...

This paper studies the effects of ECB communications about unconventional monetary policy operations on the perceived sovereign risk of Italy over the last five years. More than fifty events concerning non-standard operations are identified and classified with respect to the specific ECB...

Maximum likelihood estimation of discretely observed diffusion processes is mostly hampered by the lack of a closed form solution of the transient density. It has recently been argued that a most generic remedy to this problem is the numerical solution of the pertinent Fokker-Planck (FP) or...