Using data from Germany, Japan, UK, and the U.S., we explore possible threshold cointegration in nominal short- and long-run interest rates with corresponding inflation rates. Traditional cointegration implies perfect mean reversion in real rates and hence confirms the Fisher hypothesis....

The empirical joint distribution of return-pairs on stock indices displays high tail-dependence in the lower tail and low tail-dependence in the upper tail. The presence of tail-dependence is not compatible with the assumption of (conditional) joint normality. The presence of asymmetric-tail...

This paper questions traditional approaches for testing the day-of-the-week effect on stock returns. We propose an alternative approach based on the closure test principle introduced by Marcus, Peritz and Gabriel (1976), which has become very popular in Biometrics and Medical Statistics. We test...

In this paper we study the sources of wage growth. We identify the contribution to such growth of general, sector specific and firm specific human capital. Our results are interpretable within the context of a model where the returns to human capital may be heterogeneous and where firms may...

Ein einheitlicher Rentenbeitrag trotz längerer Lebenserwartung der Frauen, der Ausbau derKindererziehungszeiten und die Hinterbliebenenrenten stellen faktische Begünstigungen von Frauen in der gesetzlichen Rentenversicherung dar. Wie sollten derartige Umverteilungen ordnungspolitisch korrekt...

The aim of this paper is to analyze and estimate salient characteristics of unemployment dynamics. Movements in unemployment are viewed as "chain reactions" of responses to labour market shocks, working their way through systems of interacting lagged adjustment processes. In the context of...

Motivated by economic-theory concepts - the Fisher hypothesis and the theory of the term structure - we consider a small set of simple bivariate closed-loop time-series models for the prediction of price inflation and of long- and short-term interest rates. The set includes vector...

This paper studies the voluntary provision of public goods that is partially driven by a desire to offset for individual polluting activities. We first extend existing theory and show that offsets allow a reduction in effective environmental pollution levels while not necessarily extending the...

We estimate a New Keynesian DSGE model on French, German, Italian, and Spanish data. The main aim of this paper is to check for the respective sets of parameters that are stable over time, making use of the ESS procedure ('Estimate of Set of Stable parameters') developed by Inoue and Rossi...

Many European countries are currently transferring their pay-as-you-go public pension system to a three-pillar-system of public, occupational, and private pensions. In Germany, economists expect a pension gap for future retiree cohorts as public pensions will decrease and private old age...