Political stock markets (PSM) are sometimes seen as substitutes for opinion polls. On the bases of a behavioral model, specific preconditions were drawn out under which manipulation in PSM can weaken this argument. Evidence for manipulation is reported from the data of two separate PSM during...

In a meta study of 25 political stock markets conducted in Germany in the last decade we analyze their predictive success. Although the predictions of political stock markets are highly correlated with the corresponding polls, the markets are able to aggregate additional information. One...

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...

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...

Motivated by a nonparametric GARCH model we consider nonparametric additive regression and autoregression models in the special case that the additive components are linked parametrically. We show that the parameter can be estimated with parametric rate and give the normal limit. Our procedure...

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...

We consider simple models of financial markets with regular traders and insiders possessing some extra information hidden in a random variable which is accessible to the regular trader only at the end of the trading interval. The problems we focus on are the calculation of the additional utility...