A number of unit root tests which accommodate a deterministic level shift at a known point in time are compared in a Monte Carlo study. The tests differ in the way they treat the deterministic term of the DGP. It turns out that Phillips-Perron type tests have very poor small sample properties...

On the basis of a real high stakes insurance experiment with small probabilities of losses, we demonstrate that concern is a more important driver of WTP for insurance than subjective probability estimates when there is ambiguity surrounding the estimate. Concern is still important when...

In this paper we present an experiment on the false consensus effect. Unlike previous experiments, we provide monetary incentives for revealing the actual estimation of others' behavior. In each session and round sixteen subjects make a choice between two options simultaneously. Then they...

Alternative modeling strategies for specifying subset VAR models are considered. It is shown that under certain conditions a testing procedure based on t-ratios is equivalent to sequentially eliminating lags that lead to the largest improvement in a prespecified model selection criterion. A...

In this article we model the log of the U.S. and the U.K. real oil prices in terms of fractionally integrated processes with a mean shift. We use different versions of the tests of Robinson (1994), which have standard null and local limit distributions. The results indicate that if we model the...

A new kind of mixture autoregressive model with GARCH errors is introduced and applied to the U.S. short-term interest rate. According to the diagnostic tests developed in the paper and further informal checks the model is capable of capturing both of the typical characteristics of the...

The unbiased expectations hypothesis states that forward rates are unbiased estimates for future short rates. Cox, Ingersoll and Ross [1] conjectured that this hypothesis should be inconsistent with the absence of arbitrage possibilities. Using the framework of Heath, Jarrow and Morton [4] we...

Motivated by a hedging problem in mathematical finance, El Karoui and Quenez [7] and Kramkov [14] have developed optional versions of the Doob-Meyer decomposition which hold simultaneously for all equivalent martingale measures. We investigate the general structure of such optional...

When people decide about saving and consumption across the various periods of their life time they take into account their life expectancy when comparing present and future needs and resources for satisfying them. The experimental design, applied at two sites (Humboldt-University at Berlin and...