The empirical finding that entrepreneurs tend to invest a large share of their wealth in their own firms despite comparably low returns and high risk has become known as the private equity premium puzzle. This paper provides evidence supporting the hypothesis that lower risk aversion of...

This study is motivated by the development of credit-related instruments and signals of stock price movements of large banks during the recent financial crisis. What is common to most of the empirical studies in this field is that they concentrate on modeling the conditional mean. However,...

When possible income tax reforms are debated, the suspected impact on entrepreneurship is often used as an argument in favour or against a certain policy. Quantitative ex-ante evaluations of the effect of certain tax reform options on entrepreneurship based on microeconometric research have not...

Why are female entrepreneurs so rare? Women have both to a lower entry rate into selfemployment and a higher exit rate in Germany. To explain the gender gap, a structural microeconometric model of the transition rates is estimated, which includes a standard risk aversion parameter. As inputs...

In vector autoregressive analysis confidence intervals for individual impulse responses are typically reported to indicate the sampling uncertainty in the estimation results. A range of methods are reviewed and a new proposal is made for constructing joint confidence bands, given a prespecified...

There is evidence that estimates of long-run impulse responses of structural vector autoregressive (VAR) models based on long-run identifying restrictions may not be very accurate. This finding suggests that using short-run identifying restrictions may be preferable. We compare structural VAR...

The performance of information criteria and tests for residual heteroskedasticity for choosing between different models for time-varying volatility in the context of structural vector autoregressive analysis is investigated. Although it can be difficult to find the true volatility model with the...

Different bootstrap methods and estimation techniques for inference for structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) models identified by generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) are reviewed and compared in a Monte Carlo study. The bootstrap methods considered are a wild...

Methods for constructing joint confidence bands for impulse response functions which are commonly used in vector autoregressive analysis are reviewed. While considering separate intervals for each horizon individually still seems to be the most common approach, a substantial number of methods...

This paper proposes a new non-parametric method of constructing joint confidence bands for impulse response functions of vector autoregressive models. The estimation uncertainty is captured by means of bootstrapping and the highest density region (HDR) approach is used to construct the bands. A...