The present study addresses the economic interpretation of stock market volatility. We argue that its character is inherently ambivalent, being considered as an indicator of either information flow or uncertainty.We discriminate between these views by measuring the fraction of price changes that...

This paper analyses mutual causalities between crude oil price and euro / US dollar exchange rate. Instead of focusing on long-run macroeconomic linkages like the bulk of the relevant literature takes a financial markets perspective using daily data. The fast-running simultaneousimpacts are...

A new test for constant correlation is proposed. Based on the bivariate Student-t distribution, this test is derived as Lagrange multiplier (LM) test. Whereas most of the traditional tests (e.g. Jennrich, 1970, Tang, 1995 and Goetzmann, Li & Rouwenhorst, 2005) specify the unknown correlations as...

Many companies depend on weather conditions, so they require reliable weather forecasts for production planning or risk hedging. In this article, we propose a new way of gaining weather forecasts by exploiting the forward-looking information included in the market prices of weather derivatives...

The increasing exposure to renewable energy has amplified the need for risk management in electricity markets. Electricity price risk poses a major challenge to market participants. We propose an approach to model and fore- cast electricity prices taking into account information on renewable...

Microfoundations of the euro´s effect on euro area trade hinge on the timing, thespeed and the size of adjustment in trade costs. We estimate timing, speed and sizeof adjustment in trade costs for sectoral trade data. Our approach allows for sectorspecific impacts of trade costs on sectoral...

The paper proposes a data driven adaptive model selection strategy. The selection criterionmeasures economic ex-ante forecasting content by means of trading implied cash flows.Empirical evidence suggests that the proposed strategy is neither exposed to selection biasnor to the risk of choosing...

We analyze the impact of short-run economic fluctuations on age-specific mortality usingBayesian time series econometrics and contribute to the debate on the procyclicality ofmortality. For the first time, we examine the differing consequences of economic changesfor all individual age classes....

This article provides a comprehensive econometric analysis of factors driving aggregatemortality rates over time. It differs from previous studies in this field by simultaneouslyconsidering an extensive set of macroeconomic, socio-economic and ecological factors asexplanatory variables. Germany...

This paper proposes a novel approach to the combination of conditional covariancematrix forecasts based on the use of the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM). Itis shown how the procedure can be generalized to deal with large dimensional systemsby means of a two-step strategy. The finite sample...