Although stock splits seem to be a purely cosmetic event, there exists ample empirical evidence from the United States that stock splits are associated with abnormal returns on both the announcement and the execution day, and additionally with an increase in variance following the ex-day. This...

According to the Sharpe-Lintner capital asset pricing model, expected rates of return on individual stocks differ only because of their different levels of non-diversifiable risk (beta). However, Fama/French (1992) show that the two variables size and book-to-market ratio capture the...

The so-called 'Monday effect ' has been found for various stock markets of the world. The empirical finding that Monday returns are significantly smaller than returns measured for the remaining days of the week calls the efficiency hypothesis for pricing processes operating on stock markets into...

The Normal Inverse Gaussian (NIG) distribution recently introduced by Barndorff-Nielsen (1997) is a promising alternative for modelling financial data exhibiting skewness and fat tails. In this paper we explore the Bayesian estimation of NIG-parameters by Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods. --...

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...

Let a process SI , ... ,ST obey the conditionally heteroskedastic equation St = Vt Et whcrc Et is a random noise and Vt is the volatility coefficient which in turn obeys an autoregression type equation log v t = w + a S t- l + nt with an additional noise nt. We consider the situation which the...

This paper presents an analysis of tax clientele effects in the German government bond market from the viewpoint of private investors. The methods developed here allow the identification of bonds that are over-valued from the viewpoint of a certain tax class, the estimation of tax-specific term...

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...

In this paper we motivate, specify and estimate a model in which the intra-day volatilty process affects the inter-transaction duration process and vice versa. In order to solve the estimation problems implied by this interdependent formulation, we first propose a GMM estimation procedure for...