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...

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...

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...

In this paper individual overconfidence within the context of an experimental asset market is investigated. Overall, 72 participants traded one risky asset on six markets of 12 participants each. The results indicate that individuals were not generally overconfident. Moreover, overconfidence was...

In this paper we investigate four hypotheses which are inconsistent with expected utility theory, but may well be explained by prospect theory. It deals with framing, the non-linearity of subjective probabilities, the disposition effect, and the correspondence of different experimental risk...

We investigate (i) whether traders on an experimental asset market form different and separate mental accounts for sale revenues and for dividend earnings and whether (ii) an increase in tax penalty or (iii) an increase in audit frequency increases tax compliance. The results indicate that...