This paper gives an overview of results and developments in the area of pricing and hedging contingent claims in an incomplete market by means of a quadratic criterion. We first present the approach of risk-minimization in the case where the underlying discounted price process X is a local...

This paper investigates the behaviour in repeated decision situations. The experimental study shows that subjects show low or no risk-aversion, but put very high value on the opportunity to sell the lottery in every stage of the decision problem. There is evidence that risk attitudes depend on...

The necessity to quantify the risk caused by the high volatility of asset prices, large insurance claims or floods has lead to an increasing interest in extreme value analysis. Generalized Pareto and extreme value distributions are well suited to model data which are exceedances above a...

Empirical studies in family economics usually rely on questionnaires, statistical or panel data. Here we try to study experimentally some crucial aspects of engaging in a marriage. First the female partner can end the relationship or suggest one of the two forms of joint venture. Whereas a full...

Most of the empirical studies dealing with international business cycles have disregarded the credibility issues that play an important role in the decision to join or not a monetary union. Most of empirical applications based on asymmetric shocks have failed to account for these aspects. In...

We show the existence, for any k E N, of processes which have the same k-marginals as Brownian motion, although they are not Brownian motions. For k = 4, this proves a conjecture of Stoyanov. The law P' of such a "weak Brownian motion of order k" can be constructed to be equivalent to Wiener...

Unit root tests are considered for time series which have a level shift at a known point in time. The shift can have a very general nonlinear form and additional deterministic mean and trend terms are allowed for. Prior to the tests the deterministic parts and other nuisance parameters of the...

Single index models are frequently used in econometrics and biometrics. Logit and Probit models are special cases with fixed link functions. In this paper we consider a bootstrap specification test that detects nonparametric deviations of the link function. The bootstrap is used with the aim to...

Recent investigations of the transmission mechanism of German monetary policy arrive at quite different conclusions regarding its stability during the period of monetary targeting by the Bundesbank. In this study small dynamic models for the monetary sector of the German economy are analyzed in...