Price indices for heterogenous goods such as real estate or fine art constitute crucial information for institutional or private investors considering alternative investments in times of financial markets turmoil. Classical mean-variance analysis of alternative investments has been hampered by...

There is increasing demand for models of time-varying and non-Gaussian dependencies for mul- tivariate time-series. Available models suffer from the curse of dimensionality or restrictive assumptions on the parameters and the distribution. A promising class of models are the hierarchical...

There are legal grounds to hear competitors in merger control proceedings, and competitor involvement has gained significance. To what extent this is economically sensible is our question. The competition authority applies some welfare standard while the competitor cares about its own profit. In...

Crypto-currencies have developed a vibrant market since bitcoin, the rst crypto-currency, was created in 2009. We look at the properties of cryptocurrencies as financial assets in a broad cross-section. We discuss approaches of altcoins to generate value and their trading and information...

Publications are a vital element of any scientist’s career. It is not only the number of media outlets but aslo the quality of published research that enters decisions on jobs, salary, tenure, etc. Academic ranking scales in economics and other disciplines are, therefore, widely used in...

We introduce a methodology for measuring default risk connectedness that is based on an out-of-sample variance decomposition of model forecast errors. The out-of-sample nature of the procedure leads to "realized" measures which, in practice, respond more quickly to crisis occurrences than those...

We introduce a dynamic panel threshold model to shed new light on the impact of inflation on long-term economic growth. The empirical analysis is based on a large panel-data set including 124 countries during the period from 1950 to 2004. For industrialized countries, our results confirm the...

This paper sheds new light on herding of institutional investors by using a unique and superior database that identifies every transaction of financial institutions. First, the analysis reveals herding behavior of institutions. Second, the replica- tion of the analysis with low-frequent and...

This paper presents the results of an empirical study concerning conventional and socially responsible mutual funds.We apply a sophisticated operations research algorithm embedded in inverse portfolio optimization on financial market data, ESG-scores and CRSP fund data. Due to our results we...