Based on administrative data from the federal employment office in Germany, we apply matching techniques to estimate the stepping-stone function of temporary agency work for the unemployed, i.e. its short-run and long-run effects on their future employment prospects. Our results show that...

We propose a novel approach to model serially dependent positive-valued variables which realize a non-trivial proportion of zero outcomes. This is a typical phenomenon in financial time series observed on high frequencies, such as cumulated trading volumes or the time between potentially...

Payroll taxes represent a major distortionary in uence of governments on labor markets. This paper examines the role of payroll taxation and the social safety net for cyclical fluctuations in a nonmonetary economy with labor market frictions and unemployment insurance, when the latter is only...

We analyse the effect of skill mismatch in a search model of equilibrium unemployment with risk-neutral agents, endogenous job destruction, and two-sided ex-ante heterogeneity. First, we examine the interaction of labour market institutions and skill mismatch. We find that skill mismatch changes...

Stock picking is the field of financial analysis that is of particular interest for many professional investors and researchers. In this study stock picking is implemented via binary classification trees. Optimal tree size is believed to be the crucial factor in forecasting performance of the...

Risk management technology applied to high dimensional portfolios needs simple and fast methods for calculation of Value-at-Risk (VaR). The multivariate normal framework provides a simple off-the-shelf methodology but lacks the heavy tailed distributional properties that are observed in data. A...

We consider a large trader seeking to liquidate a portfolio using both a transparent trading venue and a dark pool. Our model captures the price impact of trading in transparent traditional venues as well as the execution uncertainty of trading in a dark pool. The unique optimal execution...

Private banks often blame state guarantees to distort competition by giving public banks the advantage of lower funding costs. In this paper I show that if borrowers perceive the public bank as supporting economic development, private banks may be able to separate firms by self selection, enter...

We develop a dynamic model of political competition. Each party has a policymotivated ideological wing and an office-motivated opportunistic wing. A blockade arises if inner-party conflict stops policy implementation. We use this model to study whether early elections should be used to overcome...

This paper addresses the issue of how to design the institutional structure of an industry which provides two differentiated products. One good is supplied by a regulated monopoly and the other is produced in a competitive (unregulated) segment. Two possible institutional patterns are compared....