An avalanche of empirical studies has addressed the validity of the rank-size rule (or Zipf's law) in a multi-city context in many countries. City size in most countries seems to obey Zipf's law, but the question under which conditions (e.g. sample size, spatial scale) this 'law' holds remained...

This dissertation consists of two main essays in which it extends our knowledge on how stock market investors process the information from macro announcements. In the first essay, we extend the existing econometric theory to study the relation between jumps in multiple processes at a...