Motivated by repeated spikes and crashes during previous decades we investigate whether the heavily financialized market for crude oil has been driven by speculative bubbles. In our theoretical modeling we draw on the convenience yield approach in order to approximate the fundamental value of...

Stocks of German renewable energy companies have commonly been regarded as lucrative investment opportunities. Their innovative line of business initially seemed to promise considerable future earnings. As shown by two powerful bubble tests, the positive sentiment for renewable energy stocks...

This paper challenges the existing literature examining the impact of the introduction of index futures trading on the volatility of its underlying. To overcome econometric shortcomings of previously published work using the dummy variable approach, we employ a Markov-switching-GARCH technique....

In the context of the present-value stock-price model, we propose a new rational parametric bubble specification that is able to generate periodically recurring and stochastically deflating trajectories. Our bubble model is empirically more plausible than its predecessor variants and has neatly...

This paper analyzes conditional stock-price volatility within in present-value framework including (rational) periodically collapsing bubbles as introduced by Evans (1991). To this end, we derive an analytically closed-form volatility formula of the stock price. The formula establishes a direct...

This paper is about the city size and growth rate distributions as seen from the perspectives of Zipf's and Gibrat's law. We demonstrate that the Gibrat and Zipf views are theoretically incompatible in view of the Fisher-Tippett theorem, and show that the conflicting hypotheses about the size...

New and old products differ in two respects: quality and newness. Whereas a higher quality of a new product always benefits consumers, the newness itself benefits some consumers, but not others, and for some, it is even a disadvantage. We capture these features in a Hotelling model of...

In case of herding, investors follow each other, prices move together more than they normally do, and the cross-sectional dispersion of returns decreases. Chang, Cheng, and Khorana (2000) suggest to test for herding by regressing the cross-sectional absolute deviation on the absolute and squared...

Recently various exchange rate models capturing the dynamics during the transition from an exchange rate arrangement of floating rates into a currency union have been derived. Technically, these stochastic equilibrium models are diffusion processes which have to be estimated by discretely...