Two types of unit root tests which accommodate a structural level shift at a known point in time are extended to the situation where the break date is unknown. It is shown that for any estimator for the break date the tests have the same asymptotic distribution as the corresponding tests under...

It is common practice to identify the number and sources of shocks that move implied volatilities across space and time by applying Principal Components Analysis (PCA) to pooled covariance matrices of changes in implied volatilities. This approach, however, is likely to result in a loss of...

This paper analyzes short term portfolio investment opportunities in a capital market where a currency is defined as a currency basket, i.e. a linear combination of foreign currencies. In line with the mean-variance hedging approach, we determine a self-financed optimal investment strategy which...

We consider a financial market model with a large number of interacting agents. Investors are heterogeneous in their expectations about the future evolution of an asset price process. Their current expectation is based on the previous states of their "neighbors" and on a random signal about the...

Updating behavior in cascade experiments is usually investigated on the basis of urn prediction. But urn predictions alone can only provide a very rough information on individual updating behavior. Therefore, we implement a BDM mechanism. Subjects have to submit maximum prices that they are...

The paper considers the derivation of weak discrete time approximations for solutions of stochastic differential equations with time delay. These are suitable for Monte Carlo simulation and allow the computation of expectations for functionals of stochastic delay equations. The suggested...

We propose in this article a joint test for testing simultaneously a deterministic trend component and the degree of integration of the cyclical component in a given time series. The test is directly derived from Robinson's (1994) procedure, which is based on the Lagrange Multiplier (LM)...