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...

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...

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...

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...

The financial crisis 2008-2009 and the European sovereign debt crisis have shown that stress on financial markets is important for analyzing and forecasting economic activity. Since financial stress is not directly observable but is presumably reflected in many financial market variables, it is...

In 2005, the European Emission Trading Scheme (EU-ETS) established a new commodity: the right to emit a ton of CO2 (EUA). Since its launch, the corresponding price has shown rather turbulent dynamics, including nervous reactions to policy announcements and a price collapse after a visible...

We model trades-through, i.e. transactions that reach at least the second level of limit orders in an order book. Using tick-by-tick data on Euronext-traded stocks, we show that a simple bivariate Hawkes process fits nicely our empirical observations of trades-through. We show that the...

The Environmental Liability Act (Umwelthaftungsgesetz) enacted January 1, 1991 is claimed to have substantially tightened the environmental liability regime in Germany. The economic consequences of the amendment of the German environmental liability legislation initiated by the Sandoz accident...