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...

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...

Alternative modeling strategies for specifying subset VAR models are considered. It is shown that under certain conditions a testing procedure based on t-ratios is equivalent to sequentially eliminating lags that lead to the largest improvement in a prespecified model selection criterion. A...

In this article we model the log of the U.S. and the U.K. real oil prices in terms of fractionally integrated processes with a mean shift. We use different versions of the tests of Robinson (1994), which have standard null and local limit distributions. The results indicate that if we model the...

A new kind of mixture autoregressive model with GARCH errors is introduced and applied to the U.S. short-term interest rate. According to the diagnostic tests developed in the paper and further informal checks the model is capable of capturing both of the typical characteristics of the...

The unbiased expectations hypothesis states that forward rates are unbiased estimates for future short rates. Cox, Ingersoll and Ross [1] conjectured that this hypothesis should be inconsistent with the absence of arbitrage possibilities. Using the framework of Heath, Jarrow and Morton [4] we...

Newspapers and weekly magazines catering to the investing crowd often rank funds according to the returns generated in the past. Aside from satisfying sheer curiosity, these numbers are probably also the basis on which investors pick a fund to invest in. In this article, we fully characterize...

We analyze the impact of an individual's tendency to worry on willingness to pay (WTP) for a protective measure. We report on the results of a controlled experiment with real objects at stake. Worry was measured with the Worry Domains Questionnaire, an instrument determining an individual's...

People dislike inflation because inflation erodes the real value of future nominal income and wealth. Adjustment of future nominal values via a cost of living index is an appropriate way to handle the problem of real income risk. Nonetheless an important aspect needs more discussion: If markets...