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...

Bundesgesundheitsminister Rösler hat für 2011 eine umfassende Pflegereform sowohl der Leistungsseite als auch der Einnahmenstruktur angekündigt. Die Autoren dieses Beitrags machen den Vorschlag, die umlagefinanzierte Pflegeversicherung um eine kapitalgedeckte Säule zu ergänzen.

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...

Cooperation among savings and cooperative banks was criticized by the European Commission because of potentially anti-competitive effects. In an industrial economics model of banks taking deposits and giving loans we look at regional demarcation as one of such cooperative practices. There are...

Ziel dieses Beitrages ist es, die Argumente zugunsten der Beibehaltung des Ladenschlußgesetzes empirisch auf ihre Stichhaltigkeit hin zu überprüfen. Dabei sollen vor allem auch die Erfahrungen des Auslandes mit flexiblen Ladenöffnungszeiten berücksichtigt werden. Hinsichtlich der...