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....

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...

Appraisals are needed for decision-making and for performance evaluation. Knowledge on the accuracy of valuation methods is of general interest for banks and investors. We assess the accuracy of the German Regulation on Valuation with monthly data on appraisals and prices for commercial...

This paper tests the validity of Present Value (PV) models of stock prices by employing a two-step strategy for testing the null hypothesis of no cointegration against alternatives which are fractionally cointegrated. Monte Carlo simulations are conducted to evaluate the power and size...

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...

We propose a model in which mergers exert a more pronounced effect on the structure of a market than simply reducing the number of competitors. We show that this may render horizontal mergers profitable and welfare-improving even if costs are linear. The results help to reconcile theory with...

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...

In this paper, the structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model is used to analyze short-run and contemporaneous relationships between monetary aggregates and other macroeconomic variables. This requires imposing restrictions on the correlation structure of the VAR residuals. Different...

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...