We present a dynamic general equilibrium model with agency costs, where heterogeneous firms choose among two alternative instruments of external finance-corporate bonds and bank loans. We characterize the financing choice of firms and the endogenous financial structure of the economy. The...

This paper presents a new approach to deriving default intensities from CDS or bond spreads that yields smooth intensity curves required e.g. for pricing or risk management purposes. Assuming continuous premium or coupon payments, the default intensity can be obtained by solving an integral...

State price density (SPD) contains important information concerning market expectations. In existing literature, a constrained estimator of the SPD is found by nonlinear least squares in a suitable Sobolev space. We improve the behavior of this estimator by implementing a covariance structure...

In this paper we give a generalized model of the interest rates term structure including Nelson-Siegel and Svensson structure. For that we introduce a continuous m-factor exponential-polynomial form of forward interest rates and demonstrate its considerably better performance in a fitting of the...

This paper employs a Markov regime-switching approach to investigate whether the Great Moderation is over since the start of the late 2000s recession. The results conrm that the recent nancial crisis did cause a simultaneous high-volatility period among the G7 countries. However, the nancial...

Fifteen years after German reunification, the facts about slow regional convergence have born out the prediction of Barro (1991), except that migration out of East Germany has not slowed down. I document that in particular the 18-29 year old are leaving East Germany, and that the emigration has...

Contest or auction designers who want to maximize the overall revenue are frequently con- cerned with a trade-off between contest homogeneity and inclusion of contestants with high valuations. In our experimental study, we find that it is not profitable to exclude the most able contestant in...

It is investigated whether Euro-area variables can be forecast better based on synthetic time series for the pre-Euro period or by using just data from Germany for the pre-Euro period. Our forecast comparison is based on quarterly data for the period 1970Q1 - 2003Q4 for ten macroeconomic...