East German wages have been below the West German wage level since unification. Moreover, the East-West wage gap implied by the contractual wagesspecified in collective wage agreements is drifting ever further apart from the wagegap in terms of effective wages. This paper looks at the role of...

GARCH models are widely used in financial econometrics. However, we show by mean of a simple simulation example that the GARCH approach may lead to a serious model misspecification if the assumption of stationarity is violated. In particular, the well known integrated GARCH effect can be...

Graphical data representation is an important tool for model selection in bankruptcy analysis since the problem is highly non-linear and its numericalrepresentation is much less transparent. In classical rating models a convenientrepresentation of ratings in a closed form is possible reducing...

State price density (SPD) contains important information concerning market expectations. In existing literature, a constrained estimator of the SPD is found by nonlinear least squares in a suitable Sobolev space...

In semiparametric models it is a common approach to under-smooth the nonparametric functions inorder that estimators of the finite dimensional parameters can achieve root-n consistency. The requirementof under-smoothing may result as we show from inefficient estimation methods or technical...

With the recent availability of high-frequency nancial data the longrange dependence of volatility regained researchers' interest and has leadto the consideration of long memory models for realized volatility. Thelong range diagnosis of volatility, however, is usually stated for long...

Systemic weather risk is a major obstacle for the formation of private (non-subsidized) crop insurance. This paper explores the possibility of spatial diversication ofinsurance by estimating the joint occurrence of unfavorable weather conditions in dierentlocations. For that purpose copula...

Measuring and modeling financial volatility is the key to derivative pricing, asset allocation and risk management. The recent availability of high-frequency data allows for refined methods in this field. In particular, more precise measures for the daily or lower frequency volatility can be...

In this paper we provide a review of copula theory with applications to finance. We illustrate the idea on the bivariate framework and discuss the simple, elliptical and Archimedean classes of copulae. Since the copulae model the dependency structure between random variables, next we explain the...

Dimension reduction techniques for functional data analysis model and approximate smooth random functions by lower dimensional objects. In many applications the focus of interest lies not only in dimension reduction but also in the dynamic behaviour of the lower dimensional objects. The most...