Students of introductory courses consider statistics as particularly difficult,as the understanding of the underlying concepts may require more time andenergy than for other disciplines. For decades statisticians have tried to enhanceunderstanding with the help of technical solutions such as...

Along with many others, we agree that a modern education in statistics needs toincorporate the practical analysis of real datasets, which are usually more complex than the common examples found in standard textbooks. The software used in the teaching of statistics includes standard spreadsheet...

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...

Without doubt modern education in statistics must involve practical, computer-based data analysis but the question arises whether and how computational elements should be integrated into the canon of methodological education. Should the student see and study high-level programming code right at...

Statistical research has always been at the edge of available computing power. Huge datasets, e.g in DataMining or Quantitative Finance, and computationally intensive techniques, e.g. bootstrap methods, always require a little bit more computing power than is currently available. But the most...

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...