The quarterly International Economic Trends is a compilation of data on the G-7 countries and the euro area, including output, inflation, labor markets, interest rates, government budgets, international trade, and more. A brief essay in each issue covers a topic relevant to international economics.

Price comparison services are being used by more and more internet users worldwide tocompare prices of (online-)suppliers. The characteristics of price comparison services differinternationally. Not only are they different in the reference to their scope of work. Also with regard tothe technical...

In this paper we have developed a financial model of the non-life insurer to provide assistance for the management of the insurance company in making decisions on product, investment and reinsurance mix. The model is based on portfolio theory and recognizes the stochastic nature of and the...

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...

The New Keynesian Phillips Curve is at the center of two raging empirical debates. First, how can purely forward looking pricing account for the observed persistence in aggregate inflation. Second, price-setting responds to movements in marginal costs, which should therefore be the driving force...

Der Strommarkt in Deutschland befindet sich seit einigen Jahren in einem Liberalisierungsprozess,der zu einem Anstieg der Strompreisvolatilität führt. Für Elektrizitätshandelsunternehmengewinnt damit das Management des Strompreisrisikos eine zentrale Bedeutung. Vordiesem Hintergrund...

We propose a class of new robust GMM tests for endogenous structural breaks. The tests are based on supremum and average statistics derived from robust GMM estimators with a bounded influence function. They imply a bounded linearized asymptotic bias of size and power under local model...

Empirically, we show that the proportion of stocks exhibiting conditional heteroscedastic residuals, is high. We suggested to use the market model with GARCH(1,1) residuals in order to describe daily stock returns and derived a test statistics for the null hypothesis of no abnormal returns,...

Specific functional forms are often used in economic models of distributions;goodness-of-fit measures are used to assess whether a functional form is appropriatein the light of real-world data. Standard approaches use a distance criterion based onthe EDF, an aggregation of differences in...

This paper introduces a novel approach for dealing with the curse of dimensionality in thecase of large linear dynamic systems. Restrictions on the coefficients of an unrestricted VARare proposed that are binding only in a limit as the number of endogenous variables tends toinfinity...