Starting from the objective of banking supervision - to minimize the overall costs of banking to the general public - we show that the current standard of quantifying market risk is flawed. It is perfectly aligned with the interests of banks' shareholders and management, but not with the...

The use of asymptotic critical values in stationarity tests against the alternative of a unit rot process is known to lead to overrejections in finite samples when the considered process is stationary but highly persistent. We claim that in recent parametric tests this is caused by estimation...

The concept of integrated stochastic processes is widely used in empirical macroeconomics; and cointegration analysis is an important framework to analyze economic time series both in single equation and in system approaches. This framework is not only suited to study the relationships between...

We investigate the relationship between inflation and price variation using highly disaggregated, weekly price data for consumption goods recorded in Germany during 1995, a low inflation period. We find a significant positive correlation between the rates of price change and price dispersion,...

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....

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...

We emphasize the importance of properly identifying the long-run relations underlying the monetary model of the exchange rate. The separate estimation of long-run money demands leads to a "structural" error correction equation which allows an interpretation of the various channels affecting the...

Rational bargaining behavior depends crucially on the rules of bargaining, especially on whether parties decide sequentially or independently. Whereas in ultimatum bargaining the proposer can exploit the responder, independent commitments result in more balanced payoffs. To limit the scope of...