This paper analyzes which factors are driving the ZEW Indicator of Economic Sentiment. Using the results of a poll among survey participants as well as Granger causality tests we identify three groups of influence factors: other sentiment indicators, financial variables and real economy data. In...

We show in the paper that the decomposition proposed by Beveridge and Nelson (1981) for models that are integrated of order one can be generalized to seasonal Arima models by means of a partial fraction decomposition. Two equivalent algorithms are proposed to optimally (in the mean squared...

Germany and the United States are generally seen as the two competing systems of corporate governance. In search for a comparative welfare analysis of the financial systems, we are interested in (i) the aggregate value-added of corporate investments in the two countries and in (ii) the...

There is common consensus that managerial compensation is strongly tied to firm size and much less so to financial performance. One suspects that observed restructuring and downsizing in corporations in recent years may have an effect on these results. Based on multi-task theoretical...

This paper proposes a procedure for testing alternative specifications of the short term interest rate's dynamics which takes into account that according to some restrictions the interest rate is nonstationary, i.e. the traditional test statistic has a non-standard distribution. Moreover, we do...