Works councils are the most important pillar of workplace industrial relations in Germany but little is known of their economic effects. The paper uses a modern, large-scale dataset to examine this issue. Consonant with recent applied theoretical conjectures, it is found that works councils are...

Common approaches to test for the economic value of directional forecasts are based on the classical Chi-square test for independence, Fisher’s exact test or the Pesaran and Timmerman (1992) test for market timing. These tests are asymptotically valid for serially independent observations....

It is commonly accepted that information is helpful if it can be exploited to improve a decision making process. In economics, decisions are often based on forecasts of up- or downward movements of the variable of interest. We point out that directional forecasts can provide a useful framework...

A new heteroskedastic hedonic regression model is suggested which takes into account time-varying volatility and is applied to a blue chips art market. A nonparametric local likelihood estimator is proposed, and this is more precise than the often used dummy variables method. The empirical...

Discovering the preferences and the behaviour of consumers is a key challenge in marketing. Information about such topics can be gathered through surveys in which the respondents must assign a score to a number of items. In this article we suggest a strategy to analyze such data and achieve this...

A huge body of empirical and theoretical literature has emerged on the relationship between foreign exchange (FX) uncertainty and international trade. Empirical findings about the impact of FX uncertainty on trade figures are at best weak and often ambiguous with respect to its direction. Almost...