This paper analyzes short term portfolio investment opportunities in a capital market where a currency is defined as a currency basket, i.e. a linear combination of foreign currencies. In line with the mean-variance hedging approach, we determine a self-financed optimal investment strategy which...

This paper uses fractional integration and cointegration in order to model the DM/dollar and the yen/dollar real exchange rates in terms of both monetary and real factors, more specifically real interest rate and labour productivity differentials. We find that whilst the individual series may be...

In this paper we analyze the sources of German unemployment within a structural vector error correction model (SVECM) framework. For this purpose, we propose a method to estimate an exactly identified Subset SVECM, which is a SVECM with short run parameter restrictions. A cointegration analysis...

This paper entertains the notion that disturbances on the demand side play a central role in our understanding of the Great Depression. In fact, from Euler equation residuals we are able to identify a series of unusually large negative demand shocks that appeared to have hit the U. S. economy...

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....

On the basis of a real high stakes insurance experiment with small probabilities of losses, we demonstrate that concern is a more important driver of WTP for insurance than subjective probability estimates when there is ambiguity surrounding the estimate. Concern is still important when...

In this paper a two-sector growth model allowing indeterminacy to occur at relatively mild degrees of increasing returns is developed. It is shown that these economies of scale need only be present in one sector of the economy (investment). This feature of the model, therefore, builds on...

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...