This paper analyzes determinants for regional differences in German unemployment rates. We specify a spatial panel model to avoid biased and inefficient estimates due to spatial dependence. Additionally, we control for temporal dynamics in the data. Our study covers the whole of Germany as well...

The supply of affordable crop insurance is hampered by the existence of systemic weather risk which results in large risk premiums. In this article, we assess the systemic nature of weather risk for 17 agricultural production regions in China and explore the possibility of spatial...

A new heteroskedastic hedonic regression model is suggested which takes into account time-varying volatility and is applied to a blue chips art market. A nonparametric local likelihood estimator is proposed, and this is more precise than the often used dummy variables method. The empirical...

Discovering the preferences and the behaviour of consumers is a key challenge in marketing. Information about such topics can be gathered through surveys in which the respondents must assign a score to a number of items. In this article we suggest a strategy to analyze such data and achieve this...

We introduce a long memory autoregressive conditional Poisson (LMACP) model to model highly persistent time series of counts. The model is applied to forecast quoted bid-ask spreads, a key parameter in stock trading operations. It is shown that the LMACP nicely captures salient features of...

Monetary search theory implies that the real effects of inflation via its impact on price dispersion depend on the level of search costs and, thus, on the level of market integration. For less integrated markets, the inflation-price dispersion nexus is predicted to be asymmetrically V-shaped...

This paper assesses empirically the hypotheses by Bental and Demougin (2010) that innovations in ICT (Information and Communication Technology) reduce the labor share in OECD countries by improving the monitoring technology. In a first step, I show that data trends for the labor share, wages in...

Recent studies proposed news about future technology growth as the main driver of macroeconomic fluctuations. The identification of these news through stock prices in SVARs has been criticized in the past. Therefore, I propose a series of experiments to test that hypothesis by examining its...

Forecasting based pricing of Weather Derivatives (WDs) is a new approach in valuation of contingent claims on nontradable underlyings. Standard techniques are based on historical weather data. Forward-looking information such as meteorological forecasts or the implied market price of risk (MPR)...

This paper investigates why financial market experts misperceive the interest rate policy of the European Central Bank (ECB). Assuming a Taylor-rule-type reaction function of the ECB, we use qualitative survey data on expectations about the future interest rate, inflation, and output to discover...