The Patentatlas by Greif and Schmiedl (2002) represents an important source for patent data in Germany. Its use for industry-specific studies is however problematic because the correct assignment of patent data classified by technological fields to commonly used industry classifications is...

Nowcasting has been a challenge in the recent economic crisis. We introduce the Toll Index, a new monthly indicator for business cycle forecasting and demonstrate its relevance using German data. The index measures the monthly transportation activity performed by heavy transport vehicles across...

In this master thesis a mechanism to test mononicity of empirical pricing kernels (EPK) is presented. By testing monotonicity of pricing kernel we can determine whether utility function is concave or not. Strictly decreasing pricing kernel corresponds to concave utility function while...

This thesis presents the concept of tail dependence in a financial context as one tool to measure dependence in the extremes of a bivariate distribution. Copulae can separate the problem of estimating a multidimensional distribution into the estimation of the marginal distributions and the...

This paper introduces a behavioural model and an algorithm that allow define classes of investors and draw the size each of them from financial data. The nonparametric pricing kernel estimated from stocks and options quotes allows to derive an estimate of the market utility. At the micro level...