Emerging countries in many cases are more crisis-prone than highly developed industrialized countries. This is in many cases due to a weak or volatile financial sector. The best policy to strengthen crisis resistance is the building up of a sound financial position. A sound financial position of...

In Switzerland a sudden policy uncertainty shock happened in February 2014 with the close and largely unexpected acceptance of a referendum aiming at limiting free movement of persons. The referendum requires Switzerland to reintroduce annual quotas for immigrants within three years. The...

Das ifo Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung in München führt seit seiner Gründung im Jahr 1949 regelmäßige Unternehmensbefragungen durch. Bisher bestand kein institutionalisierter Datenzugang zu den Mikrodaten für Forscher außerhalb des Institutes. Die Mikrodaten werden nunmehr im ifo...

A three parameter (location, scale, shape) generalization of the logistic distribution is fitted to data. Local maximum likelihood estimators of the parameters are derived. Although the likelihood function is unbounded, the likelihood equations have a consistent root. ML-estimation combined with...

To estimate cell probabilities for ordered sparse contingency tables several smoothing techniques have been investigated. It has been recognized that nonparametric smoothing methods provide estimators of cell probabilities that have better performance than the pure frequency estimators. With the...

The procedures of estimating prediction intervals for ARMA processes can be divided into model based methods and empirical methods. Model based methods require knowledge of the model and the underlying innovation distribution. Empirical methods are based on the sample forecast errors. In this...

The choice of a smoothing parameter or bandwidth is crucial when applying nonparametric regression estimators. In nonparametric mean regression various methods for bandwidth selection exists. But in nonparametric quantile regression bandwidth choice is still an unsolved problem. In this paper a...

This paper discusses two graphical methods for the investigation of local association of two continuous random variables. Often, scalar dependence measures, such as correlation, cannot reflect the complex dependence structure of two variables. However, dependence graphs have the potential to...

In nonparametric mean regression various methods for bandwidth choice exist. These methods can roughly be divided into plug-in methods and methods based on penalizing functions. This paper uses the approach based on penalizing functions and adapt it to nonparametric quantile regression...