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...

Implied volatility is one of the key issues in modern quantitative finance, since plain vanilla option prices contain vital information for pricing and hedging of exotic and illiquid options. European plain vanilla options are nowadays widely traded, which results in a great amount of...

A primary goal in modelling the implied volatility surface (IVS) for pricing andhedging aims at reducing complexity. For this purpose one fits the IVS each dayand applies a principal component analysis using a functional norm. This approach, however, neglects the degenerated string structure of...

The pricing accuracy and pricing performance of local volatility models cruciallydepends on absence of arbitrage in the implied volatility surface: an input impliedvolatility surface that is not arbitrage-free invariably results in negative transitionprobabilities and/ or negative local...