Background: Studies from several countries have shown that self-rated health is an independent predictor of mortality. However, no empirical evidence exists for Germany so far. We investigate the effectiveness of (i) self-ratings of health by individuals and (ii) changes in self-rated health, as...

East-West migration in Germany peaked at the beginning of the 90s although the average wage gap between Eastern and Western Germany continues to average about 25%. We analyze the propensity to migrate using microdata from the German Socioeconomic Panel. Fitting a parametric Generalized Linear...

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...

We establish a relation between stochastic volatility models and the class of generalized hyperbolic distributions. These distributions have been found to fit exceptionally well to the empirical distribution of stock returns. We review the background of hyperbolic distributions and prove...

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...

Stochastic Volatility (SV) models are widely used in financial applications. To decide whether standard parametric restrictions are justified for a given dataset, a statistical test is required. In this paper, we develop such a test based on the linear state space representation. We provide a...

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...