Using a new survey of European households, we study how exogenous variation in the macroeconomic uncertainty perceived by households affects their spending decisions. We use randomized information treatments that provide different types of information about the first and/or second moments of...

Using a new survey of European households, we study how exogenous variation in the macroeconomic uncertainty perceived by households affects their spending decisions. We use randomized information treatments that provide different types of information about the first and/or second moments of...

When central banks set nominal interest rates according to an interest rate reaction function, such as the Taylor rule, and the exchange rate is priced by uncovered interest parity, the real exchange rate is determined by expected inflation differentials and output gap differentials. In this...

Extensive literature investigates the predictability of U.S. equity returns. This does not imply, however, that the results are equally valid for the German equity market. Judith Klähn's central theory is that the German stock market is not comparable to Wall Street. She proves that some of the...

Since oil prices are typically governed by nonlinear and chaotic behavior, it's become rather difficult to capture the dominant properties of their fluctuations. In recent years, unprecedented interest emerged on the decomposition methods in order to capture drifts or spikes relatively to this...

This paper investigates whether return dispersion (RD), proxied by the cross-sectional standard deviation of stock returns, captures variation in returns across German stocks between 1989 and 2010. I address existing evidence based on U.S. equity data that RD may serve as a proxy economic state...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that the variance risk premium predicts aggregate stock market returns. We demonstrate that statistical finite sample biases cannot “explain” this apparent predictability. Further corroborating the existing evidence of the U.S., we show that country...