The purpose of this paper is to sort out firm-related differences from effects that result from different economic structures. A non-parametric decomposition is used to analyse firm level difference between the wage spread in the two major regions of unified Germany. If firm-specific effects...

East German wages have been below the West German wage level since unification. Moreover, the East-West wage gap implied by the contractual wages specified in collective wage agreements is drifting ever further apart from the wage gap in terms of effective wages. This paper looks at the role of...

Pricing kernels implicit in option prices play a key role in assessing the risk aversion over equity returns. We deal with nonparametric estimation of the pricing kernel (Empirical Pricing Kernel) given by the ratio of the risk-neutral density estimator and the subjective density estimator. The...

This chapter deals with nonparametric estimation of the risk neutral density. We present three different approaches which do not require parametric functional assumptions on the underlying asset price dynamics nor on the distributional form of the risk neutral density. The first estimator is a...

We consider two semiparametric models for the weight function in a bias sample model. The object of our interest parametrizes the weight function, and it is either Euclidean or non Euclidean. One of the models discussed in this paper is motivated by the estimation the mixing distribution of...

Dimension reduction techniques for functional data analysis model and approximate smooth random functions by lower dimensional objects. In many applications the focus of interest lies not only in dimension reduction but also in the dynamic behaviour of the lower dimensional objects. The most...

After 20 years of transition from an economy integrated in an exchange scheme of planned economies towards an open market economy based on the ideas of competition, we ask whether East German firms succeeded in finding their place in the international division of labour. We concentrate on the...

This paper reviews the dramatic and widely noted developments in the German labor market in the past decade and surveys the most plausible reasons for these changes. Alternative hypotheses are compared and contrasted. I argue that the labor market reforms associated with the Agenda 2010 – the...

Publications are a vital element of any scientist’s career. It is not only the number of media outlets but aslo the quality of published research that enters decisions on jobs, salary, tenure, etc. Academic ranking scales in economics and other disciplines are, therefore, widely used in...