Rebalancing alpha is the excess return of a fixed-weight portfolio, which is regularly rebalanced, over its buy-and-hold counterpart. Two kinds of effects, both results of portfolio rebalancing, contribute to rebalancing alpha. The first is a volatility effect that arises from randomness of...

The paper explores what macroeconomic factors can tell us about the effectiveness of recently enacted national competition laws. Qualitative evidence suggests that numerous countries fall short in implementing competition law. Furthermore, there seems to be significant differences between...

This paper evaluates four publicly discussed policy options to mitigate market power in the German wholesale electricity market. These four options are: a regulatory solution favoured by the Federal Ministry for Economics and Technology, the implementation of a day-ahead flow-based market...

This paper explores the relationship between competition policy, experience of the application of competition policy, the intensity of local competition and the standard of living. Perception data from the World Economic Forum is used to measure the intensity of local competition. Richer and...

A central motivating factor for studying price markups is their effect on consumer welfare. Reported estimates of (firm-level) price markups in the literature, however, are often focused on industry or cross-country comparisons. These treat different industries equally rather than based on how...

State space models play a key role in the estimation of time-varying sensitivities in financial markets. The objective of this book is to analyze the relative merits of modern time series techniques, such as Markov regime switching and the Kalman filter, to model structural changes in the...

Due to the scarcity of reliable data, the existing literature on default risk still displays an imbalance between theoretical and empirical contributions. Consequently, the focus of this book is on empirical work. Within an intensity based modelling framework a broad range of promising...