This paper investigates the capital market relations between Euroland and the USA from 1990 until 2006. Formally based on the uncovered interest rate parity (UIP), backward recursive estimations establish a long-run equilibrium between European and US government bond yields. Since the mid-1990s...

Much of the industrialized world is undergoing a significantdemographic shift, placing strain on public pension systems. Policymakers are responding with pension system reforms that put more weight on privately managed retirement funds. One concern with these changes is the effect on individual...

The higher our aspirations, the higher the probability that we have to adjust them downwards when forming more realistic expectations later on. This paper shows that the costs induced by high aspirations are not trivial. We first develop a theoretical framework to identify the factors that...

A great proportion of stock dynamics can be explained using publicly availableinformation. The relationship between dynamics and public information may be ofnonlinear character. In this paper we offer an approach to stock picking by employing so-called decision trees and applying them to XETRA...

Empirical studies have shown that a large number of financial asset returns exhibit fat tails and are often characterized by volatility clustering and asymmetry. Also revealed as a stylized fact is Long memory or long range dependence in market volatility, with significant impact on pricing and...

In the era of Basel II a powerful tool for bankruptcy prognosis isvital for banks. The tool must be precise but also easily adaptable tothe bank's objections regarding the relation of false acceptances (TypeI error) and false rejections (Type II error). We explore the suitabil-ity of Smooth...

This paper offers a new method for estimation and forecasting of the linear and nonlinear time series when the stationarity assumption is violated. Our general local parametric approach particularly applies to general varying-coefficient parametric models, such as AR or GARCH, whose coefficients...

A solution method is derived in this paper for solving a system of linear rationalexpectations equation with lagged expectations (e.g., models incorporating sticky information) using the method of undetermined coefficients for the infinite MA representation. The method applies a combination of a...

This paper analyzes German and Spanish fiscal policy using simple policy rules. We choose Germany and Spain, as both are Member States in the European Monetary Union (EMU) and underwent considerable increases in public debt in the early 1990s. We focus on the question, how fiscal policy behaves...

Let W denote a family of probability distributions with parameter space t, and WG be a subfamily of W depending on a mapping G : O -- t. Extremum estimations of the parameter vector v e O are considered. Some sufficient conditions are presented to ensure the uniqueness with probability one. As...