Although auction prices are based on actual transactions, they provide a thick market only for high quality, expensive wines and may overestimate climate's effect on farmer revenues. Wholesale prices, on the other hand, do provide broad coverage of all wines sold and probably come closest to...

The extent of the demographic changes in Europe is dramatic and will deeply affect future labor, financial and goods markets. The expected strain on public budgets and especially social security has already received prominent attention, but aging poses many other economic challenges that...

This paper provides a general framework for integration of high-frequency intraday data into the measurement forecasting of daily and lower frequency volatility and return distributions. Most procedures for modeling and forecasting financial asset return volatilities, correlations, and...

The paper characterizes predictable components in excess rates of returns on major equity and foreign exchange markets using lagged excess returns, dividend yields, and forward premiums as instruments. Vector autoregressive techniques demonstrate one-step-ahead predictability and provide implied...

This paper extends previous work on the information in the term structure at longer maturities to other countries besides the United states, using a newly constructed data set for 1 to 5 year interest rates from Britain, West Germany and Switzerland. Even with wide differences in inflation...

This chapter provides an overview of the German long-term care insurance. We document care needs and wellbeing of the elderly population. Moreover, we provide a detailed description of the German long-term care institutions (sources of finance and types of benefits), the professional care work...

This paper examines the relationship between spot and futures prices for a broad range of commodities, including energy, precious and base metals, and agricultural commodities. In particular, we examine whether futures prices are (1) an unbiased and/or (2) accurate predictor of subsequent spot...

Federal tax policy provides a broad array of incentives for energy investment. I review those policies and construct estimates of marginal effective tax rates for different energy capital investments as of 2007. Effective tax rates vary widely across investment classes. I then consider...

I use U.S. patent data from 1970 to 1994 to estimate the effect of energy prices on energy-efficient innovations. Using patent citations to construct a measure of the usefulness of the existing base of scientific knowledge, I consider the effect of both demand-side factors, which spur innovative...

We show that modifying the standard neoclassical growth model by assuming that competition is imperfect makes it easier to explain the size of the declines in output and real wages that follow increases in the price of oil. Plausibly parameterized models of this type are able to mimic the...