Die Gestaltung der Produktpalette war ein zentrale Herausforderung für ostdeutsche Unternehmen nach der Wende. Spezialisierung oder eine diffuse Generalistenstrategie war die Frage. Welche Strategie sich durchgesetzt hat und ob der Anschluss an den Westen gelang, wird in dieser Arbeit erstmals...

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...

Using structural VARs, I find that external shocks are an important source of macroeconomic fluctuations in emerging markets. Furthermore, U.S. monetary policy shocks affect quickly and strongly interest rates and the exchange rate in a typical emerging market. The price level and real output in...

The vast majority of regions in West Germany, and the EU, have become more similar in terms of per-capita income and productivity between 1980 and 2000. But a number of rich areas - generally large agglomerations - have succeeded in departing from this trend ofconvergence. They are continuing to...

Functional principal component analysis (FPCA) based on theKarhunen-Lo`eve decomposition has been successfully applied in manyapplications, mainly for one sample problems. In this paper we consider common functional principal components for two sample problems. Our research is motivated not only...

We decompose by origin the sources of the variation in real aggregate output and aggregate price level in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. We find that a sizable fraction of the variation is attributable to external shocks, especially so for aggregate price level. We show that euroarea...

In recent policy debates some have argued that expansionary monetarypolicy in Japan can increase real output in Japan and in Japans neighbors,while others have warned that it is a beggar-thy-neighbor policy. In this paper weestimate structural vector autoregressions to assess the effects of...

In the data, individual prices change frequently and by large amounts. In standardsticky price models, frequent and large price changes imply a fast response of the aggregate price level to nominal shocks. This paper presents a model in which price setting firms optimally decide what to observe,...

Functional data analysis (FDA) has become a popular technique in applied statistics.In particular, this methodology has received considerable attention in recent studiesin empirical finance. In this talk we discuss selected topics of functional principalcomponents analysis that are motivated by...

Trading, hedging and risk analysis of complex option portfolios depend on accurate pricing models. The modelling of implied volatilities (IV) plays an important role, since volatility is the crucial parameter in the Black-Scholes (BS) pricing formula. It is well known from empirical studies that...