Surveys are a widely used tool to answer socio-economic research question across disciplines. However, data collection can face certain problems such as nonresponding units. For household and population surveys, a large body of literature about the effects of nonresponse exist but only less is...

This study was prepared by Beate Schirwitz while she was working at the Ifo Institute’s Dresden Branch. It was completed in February 2012 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Faculty of Law, Management, and Economics at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in July 2012. It focuses on a...

As one of the main pillars of the ifo Institute's economic research, the ifo Business Survey has been conducted monthly since 1949, a year after the foundation of the ifo Institute. Since then, ifo has extended its survey activity by developing and administering additional business, expert, and...

The payoff of many credit derivatives depends on the level of credit spreads. In particular, the payoff of credit derivatives with a leverage component is sensitive to jumps in the underlying credit spreads. In the framework of first passage time models we extend the model introduced in...