We use weekly survey data on short-term and medium-term sentiment of German investors in order to study the causal relationship between investors' mood and subsequent stock price changes. In contrast to extant literature for other countries, a tri-variate vector autoregression for short-run...

Processes of social opinion formation might be dominated by a set of highly influential agents acting as 'opinion leaders'. Here we explore whether such a perspective could shed light on the dynamics of a well known economic sentiment index. To this end, we hypothesize that the respondents of...

The previous literature provides a highly ambiguous picture on the impact of trade and investment agreements on FDI. Most empirical studies ignore the actual content of BITs and RTAs, treating them as 'black boxes', despite the diversity of investment provisions constituting the essence of these...

We study the well-known multiplicative Lognormal cascade process in which the multiplication of Gaussian and Lognormally distributed random variables yields time series with intermittent bursts of activity. Due to the non-stationarity of this process and the combinatorial nature of such a...

In this paper, we analyze the network properties of the Italian e-MID data based on overnight loans during the period 1999-2010. We show that the networks appear to be random at the daily level, but contain significant non-random structure for longer aggregation periods. In this sense, the daily...

Maximum likelihood estimation of discretely observed diffusion processes is mostly hampered by the lack of a closed form solution of the transient density. It has recently been argued that a most generic remedy to this problem is the numerical solution of the pertinent Fokker-Planck (FP) or...