The paper explores the investment behaviour of German firms in the context of the Qapproach, which plays a dominant role in empirical investment research. The analysis is based on the Deutsche Bundesbank's corporate balance sheet statistics. The panel data set contains some 2,300 German firms'...

The paper investigates which impact housing costs have upon the tenure choice of households. In using the German "Einkommens- und Verbrauchsstichprobe 1993" a rich amount of both, individual household and dwelling data is available. By means of regression analysis hedonic rental costs and...

The histogram location approach has been proposed by Kahn (1997) to estimate the fraction of wage cuts prevented by downward nominal wage rigidity. In this paper, we analyze the validity of the approach by means of a simulation study which yielded evidence of unbiasedness but also of potential...

Since attrition in the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) has cumulated to a considerable extent, there is concern that attrition biases empirical analysis. In this paper we compare the performance of four different strategies for estimating an earnings equation in the presence of panel...

The study analyses the unconditional distribution of monthly S&P 500 stock index returns for the long-run time period 1871-2004. The return distribution can be adequately described by a mixture of two Gaussian normal distributions. However, when analysing sub-samples of this long-time horizon,...

The paper investigates the increasing ratio of financial asset aquisition to net fixed capital formation using the financial account statistic of the Deutsche Bundesbank. An increasing ratio is measured for all german sectors as well as for the producing enterprises. Using descriptive methods...

Several empirical papers find that firms a priori classified as liquidity constrained exhibit greater sensitivity of investment to cash flow than those classified as unconstrained. In this paper we analyse the robustness of these findings in different ways. We use three different methods...

The question of whether or not mergers and acquisitions have helped to enhance banks' efficiency and profitability has not yet been conclusively resolved in the literature. We argue that this is partly due to severe methodological problems involved. In this study we analyze the effect of German...

We analyse the investment behavior of German firms within the framework of the Q-theory. Because we use anonymous individual firm balance sheet data, no stock market measure of Q is available. The data set contains 1,342 manufacturing firms covering the period 1987 to 1998. Using the approach of...

The paper is concerned with the question of whether the pricing of US stocks has been efficient in terms of the present value model. The MTAR model used in the context of market efficiency is extended by means of a rolling window estimation strategy. This rolling MTAR analysis revealed that the...