This study deals with youth unemployment trends in Europe since the mid of the 80ths in general and regards individual risk factors for Germany and the United Kingdom in particular in the mid of the 90ths. The study for the two selected countries shows that the individual risk of (long-term)...

The German unemployment rate shows strong signs if non-stationarity over the course of the previous decades. This is in line with an insider-outsider model under full hysteresis. We applied a "theory-guided view" to the data using the structural VAR model as developed by Balmaseda, Dolado and...

The estimation of the costs of conflict is currently receiving a lot of attention in the literature. This paper aims to give a thorough overview of the existing literature, first by addressing the history of case studies that address conflict costs and second by looking at the existing body of...

We hypothesize that an individual's time use choices are contingent on the time use choices of others because the utility derived from leisure time often benefits from the presence of companionable others inside and outside the household. We develop a model of time use, and demonstrate that its...

We study the optimal choice of quasi-likelihoods for nearly integrated,possibly non-normal, autoregressive models. It turns out that the two mostnatural candidate criteria, minimum Mean Squared Error (MSE) and maximumpower against the unit root null, give rise to different...

Exchange rates typically exhibit time-varying patterns in both means andvariances. The histograms of such series indicate heavy tails. In thispaper we construct models which enable a decision-maker to analyze theimplications of such time series patterns for currency risk management.Our approach...

We prove that the probability distribution of Hill's estimator can be betterapproximated by a series of appropriate gamma distributions than by the limitingnormal distribution.

Large data sets in finance with millions of observations have becomewidely available. Such data sets enable the construction of reliablesemi-parametric estimates of the risk associated with extreme pricemovements. Our approach is based on semi-parametric statisticalextreme value analysis, and...

Estimation using simulation techniques may be very time consuming. Specification tests for structuralstability often require more than one of such computationally demanding estimators. Typically one for thesample, one for the post-sample and one for the combination of sample and post-sample is...