Fragmentation of the value-added-chain is modeled as the reaction of monopolistically competitive firms to the removal of barriers to trade and factor mobility in an integrated trading environment. Since fragmentation requires high-skilled labor, this form of globalization can induce labor...

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...

We reexamine the expectations theory of the term structure focusing on the question how monetary policy actions indicated by changes in the very short rate affect long-term interest rates. Our main point is that the expectations hypothesis implies that very long rates should only react to...

To assess the predictive content of the interest rate term spread for future economic growth, we distinguish short-run from long-run predictability by using two different approaches. First, following Dufour and Renault (1998) a test procedure is proposed to test for causality at different...

In a world with imperfect competition, market externalities or asymmetric information, the impact of money and monetary policy on the real sector depends on the way money is created. Two conflicting views of money supply can be distinguished in the literature: the endogeneity view and the...