The purpose of this paper is to sort out firm-related differences from effects that result from different economic structures. A non-parametric decomposition is used to analyse firm level difference between the wage spread in the two major regions of unified Germany. If firm-specific effects...

The paper develops a non-parametric, non-stationary framework for business-cycle dating based on an innovative statistical methodology known as Adaptive Weights Smoothing (AWS). The methodology is used both for the study of the individual macroeconomic time series relevant to the dating of the...

We consider the problem of estimating the fractional order of a L´evyprocess from low frequency historical and options data. An estimationmethodology is developed which allows us to treat both estimation andcalibration problems in a unified way. The corresponding procedureconsists of two steps:...

In this note we establish the existence of the first two moments of the asymptotic tracestatistic, which appears as weak limit of the likelihood ratio statistic for testing the cointe-gration rank in a vector autoregressive model and whose moments may be used to developpanel cointegration tests....

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new likelihood-based panel cointegration testin the presence of a linear time trend in the data generating process. This new test is an extensionof the likelihood ratio (LR) test of Saikkonen & L¨utkepohl (2000) for trend-adjusteddata to the panel data...

The behaviour of market agents has always been extensively covered in the literature. Risk averse behaviour, described by von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944) via a concave utility function, is considered to be a cornerstone of classical economics. Agents prefer a fixed profit over uncertain...

We introduce new stylometry tools based on the sliced conditional compression complexity of literary texts which are inspired by the nearly optimal application of the incomputable Kolmogorov conditional complexity (and presumably approximates it). Whereas other stylometry tools can occasionally...

In this paper we analyse bootstrap procedures for systems cointegration tests with a prior adjustment for deterministic terms suggested by Saikkonen & Lüutkepohl (2000b) and Saikkonen,Lütkepohl & Trenkler (2006). The asymptotic properties of the bootstrap test procedures are derived and their...

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...