The appropriate design of monetary policy in integrated financial markets is one of the most challenging areas for central banks. One hot topic is whether the rise in liquidity in recent years has contributed to the formation of price bubbles in asset markets. If strong linkages exist, the...

The use of log-transformed data has become standard in macroeconomic forecasting with VAR models. However, its appropriateness in the context of out-of-sample forecasts has not yet been exposed to a thorough empirical investigation. With the aim of filling this void, a broad sample of VAR models...

Before the World War I, the urban rental housing market in Germany could be described as a free and competitive market. The government hardly interfered in the relationships between the landlords and ten- ants. The rents were set freely. During the World War I, the market was hit by several...

Recently there have been much discussion of the theory and applications of long memory processes. In this paper we consider the standard linear model y=X*b+u and assume that the variance covariance matrix of the errors being generated from an ARFIMA(0,d,0) model. Following Banerjee and Magnus...

Parental leave and subsidized child care are prominent examples of family policies supporting the reconciliation of family life and labor market careers for mothers. In this paper, we combine different empirical strategies to evaluate the employment effects of these policies for mothers in...

Expectations form the basis of economic decisions of market participants in an uncertain world. Sentiment indicators reflect those expectations and thus have a proven track record for predicting economic variables. However, respondents of surveys perceive the world to a large extent with the...

The GARCH(1,1) model and its extensions have become a standard econometric tool for modeling volatility dynamics of financial returns and port-folio risk. In this paper, we propose an adjustment of GARCH implied conditional value-at-risk and expected shortfall forecasts that exploits the...

The growth of the German economy intrinsically depends on the development of German exports to the euro area, which is by far the biggest market for German products. The paper estimates a structural equation for the export demand from the EMU member countries, which is suitable for both...

The paper analyses the effect of class size, which stands proxy for school quality, on early career earnings. Using confidential district level information from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), it is demonstrated that class size has no discernible effect on early career earnings. This...

This paper estimates ordered logit and probit regression models for bank ratings which also include a country index to capture country-specific variation. The empirical findings provide support to the hypothesis that the individual international bank ratings assigned by Fitch Ratings are...