Recently, early investments in the human capital of children from socially disadvantaged environments have attracted a great deal of attention. In a discrete version of the Mirrlees model with a parents' and a children's generation we show the intra-generational and the inter-generational...

Annual, before-tax income is the most common official statistic used to measure economic well-being and therefore underlies the design of most anti-poverty programs or other redistributive economic policies. Notwithstanding, extended income measures as well as consumption based measures are...

We use a large linked employer-employee data set to analyze the importance of relative wage positions in the context of individual quit decisions as an inverse measure of job satisfaction. Our main findings are: (1) Workers with higher relative wage positions within their firms are on average...

Atheoretical regression trees (ART) are applied to detect changes in the mean of a stationary long memory time series when location and number are unknown. It is shown that the BIC, which is almost always used as a pruning method, does not operate well in the long memory framework. A new method...

The village funds programme in Thailand is one of the biggest microfinance programmes in the world aiming at improving access to finance and income in rural areas. Earlier studies indicate that the programme is successful in realising its ambitions to some degree. We extend this work by...

We study the problem of determining both the structure and the schedule of projects subject to capacity constraints. We assume that those projects are flexible in the sense that the activities to be implemented are not entirely known in advance. In such a setting, decisions must be made with...

This paper provides a multivariate score-type test to distinguish between true and spurious long memory. The test is based on the weighted sum of the partial derivatives of the multivariate local Whittle likelihood function. This approach takes phase shifts in the multivariate spectrum into...

This paper analyzes and quantifies the idea of model risk in the environment of internal model building. We define various types of model risk including estimation risk, model risk in distribution and model risk in functional form. By the quantification of these concepts we analyze the impact of...

We consider a recently proposed class of nonlinear time series models and focus mainly on misspecification testing for models of such type. Following the modeling cycle for nonlinear time series models of specification, estimation and evaluation we first treat how to choose an adequate...

Als Teil des operationellen Risikos stellt das Modellrisiko eine wichtige Komponente für die Risikoermittlung bei Finanzinstitutionen dar. Da letztere z.B. bei der Tarifierung und Bepreisung von Derivaten bzw. Portfolien oder bei der Markt- und Kreditrisikoberechnung auf stochastische Modelle...