This paper compares volatility forecasts for the RTS Index (the main index for the Russian stock market) generated by alternative models, specifically option-implied volatility forecasts based on the Black-Scholes model, ARCH/GARCH-type model forecasts, and forecasts combining those two using a...

20 years ago, Zweifel, Felder and Meier (1999) established the by now famous "red-herring" hypothesis, according to which population ageing does not lead to an increase in per capita health care expenditures (HCE) because the observed positive correlation between age and health care expenditures...

This paper documents a comparative application of algorithms to deal with the problem of missing values in higher frequency data sets. We refer to Swiss business tendency survey (BTS) data which are conducted in both monthly and quarterly frequency, where an information sub-set is collected at...

This paper analyses persistence and non-linearities in quarterly and monthly US Treasury 10-year bond yields over the period 1962-2021 using two different fractional integration approaches including Chebyshev polynomials and Fourier functions respectively. The results for both quarterly and...

Almost all countries worldwide closed schools at the outbreak of the Covid-19 crisis. I document that schooling time dropped on average by -55% in the US and -45% in Germany from the onset of the crisis to the summer of 2021. In the US, schools were closed longer in richer than in poorer areas,...

This paper investigates whether gold and silver can be considered safe havens by examining their long-run linkages with 22 stock price indices. More specifically, the stochastic properties of the differential between gold/silver prices and 22 stock indices are analysed applying fractional...

In this paper we consider an empirical collective household model of time allocation for two-earner households. The novelty of this paper is that we estimate a version of the collective household model, where the internally produced goods and the externally purchased goods are assumed to be...