The term structure of interest rates is an important input for basically every pricing model and is mostly calibrated on coupon bond prices. Therefore, the estimated interest rates should accurately explain the market prices of these bonds. However, nearly all empirical papers on interest rate...

This paper investigates the employment growth of small and medium-sized firms that survived the transformation process of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). We find that firms founded in the later period of the GDR’s existence have especially low growth prospects, even 10 years after German...

Several authors have noticed poor finite sample behavior of the most widely used parametric variogram estimator by Cressie (1985). This behavior is most notable in the case that fitting is done on the collection of squared differences of observations from all point pairs, the so-called variogram...

As in any statistical test, a power analysis can help in assessing the outcomes of whether global or local spatial dependencies exist. This point was briefly addressed with respect to global Moran's , but it has not been widely used. One reason may be that the most commonly used spatial analysis...

Spillover phenomena are usually statistically estimated on the basis of regional and temporal panel data. In this paper we review and investigate exploratory and confirmatory statistical panel data techniques. We illustrate the methods by calculations in the stetting of the well known Research...

In this paper we consider optimal design of experiments in the case of correlated observations. We use and further develop the concept of design measures introduced by Pázman & Müller (1998) for the construction of a simple, quick and elegant design algorithm. We support the construction of...

We estimate the speed of income convergence for a sample of 196 European NUTS 2 regions over the period 1985-1999. So far there is no direct estimator available for dynamic panels with strong spatial dependencies. We propose a two-step procedure, which involves first spatial filtering of the...