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,...

This study investigates the role of gender in financial risk-taking. Specifically, I ask whether female investors tend to fund less risky investment projects than males. To answer this question, I use real-life investment data collected at the largest German market for peer-to-peer lending....

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...

Which role do individual income prospects play in the decision to be an entrepreneur rather than an employee? In a model of occupational choice, higher expected after-tax earnings attract people to self-employment, while more risky net earnings deter risk-averse individuals. In this paper I...

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...

We examine the degree of natural gas market integration in Europe, North America and Japan, between the mid 1990's and 2002. The relationship between the international gas marker prices, and their relation to the oil price, are investigated through principal component analysis and Johansen...

The conditions under which European monetary policy is likely to be conducted are investigated by means of multi-variate time series modelling using aggregated data of all eleven European Monetary Union member states. A cointegration analysis identifies two stable long-run relationships, one of...

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...