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...

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...

With this study we are the first to systematically compare todays two major counterparts as a source of accounting and financial data for researchers: Compustat North America by Standard & Poors and Worldscope by Thomson Financial. This investigation is conducted for U.S. and partly Canadian...

This paper documents the conglomerate discount for all available German firms andthe DAX 30 firms in detail. It shows a moderate discount of about 0.06 based onGerman comparable firms and of about 0.20 for a combined sample of German andEuropean peer groups. I further examine the relationship...

This paper investigates industry classification systems. During the last 50 yearsthere has been a considerable discussion of problems regarding the classification of economic data by industries. From my perspective, the central point of each classification is to determine a balance between...

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...

This paper investigates which comparables selection method generates the mostprecise forecasts when valuing European companies with the enterprise value to EBIT multiple. We also consider the USA as a reference point. It turns out that selecting comparable companies with similar return on assets...