In 2001, the Fed has lowered interest rates in a series of cuts, starting from 6.5 % at the end of 2000 to 2.0 % by early November. This paper asks, whether the Federal Reserve Bank has been surprising the markets, taking as given the conventional view about the effect of monetary policy shocks....

Most models of labor markets and (un)employment neglect how competition among firms or sectors of the economy affects their hiring of workers and working times. Our approach pays special attention to such effects by proposing a complex stage game where firms invest in capital equipment before...

The regional distribution of unemployment rates in the Czech Republic over the transition period is shown to be characterized by twin peaks, e.g. a high and a low unemployment equilibrium. The emergence of strong regional disparities at the beginning of the 1990s can, at least partially, be...

In a complete financial market every contingent claim can be hedged perfectly. In an incomplete market it is possible to stay on the safe side by superhedging. But such strategies may require a large amount of initial capital. Here we study the question what an investor can do who is unwilling...

In this note the unobserved component approach underlying the software package SEATS is compared with the Beveridge-Nelson type of decomposition for seasonal time series. The main strength of the SEATS approach lies in the appealing model formulation and the careful specification and adjustment...