The present thesis extends the economic literature on the enforcement of environmental regulations by empirically analysing the effectiveness of environmental criminal law. It is a shortcoming of the discussion on the merits of criminal sanctions for environmental offenses that the empirical...

Germany has been an immigration country for more than 30 years now, although many politicians claim the opposite and many people in Germany are inclined to agree with their assessment. However, it is the actual experience with immigration, and not what people would like to experience, which...

In an increasingly competitive environment, firms have to optimally adjust both their allocation of input factors and their technology portfolio. The latter determines economies of scope and scale in future research and production. The aim of this dissertation is to achieve better insight into...

The H−family of distributions or H−distributions, introduced byTukey (1960, 1977), are generated by a single transformation of the standard normal distribution and allow for leptokurtosis represented by the parameter h. Alternatively, Haynes, MacGillivray and Mengersen (1997) generated...

The imprecise Beta model (IBM) of Bernard (1996) and Walley (1996) is the most popular model for learning about a binomial random variable under prior ignorance. Piatti et al. (2005) show that there is a fundamental issue with the interpretation of results produced by the IBM in applications....

Closed-form, trivially evaluated approximations for the density and cumulative distribution function of the doubly noncentral t distribution are developed based on saddlepoint methods. They exhibit remarkable accuracy throughout the entire support of the distribution and are vastly superior to...

The recently proposed class of MixN-GARCH models, which couple a mixed normal distributional structure with linked GARCH-type dynamics, has been shown to offer a plausible decomposition of the contributions to volatility, as well as admirable out-of-sample forecasting performance, for financial...

We consider consistent tests for stochastic dominance efficiency at any order of a given portfolio with respect to all possible portfolios constructed from a set of assets. We justify block bootstrap approaches to achieve valid inference in a time series setting. The test statistics are computed...

We analyze financial constraints for R&D, where we account for heterogeneityamong investments which has been neglected in previous literature. According toeconomic theory, investments should be distinguished by their degree ofuncertainty, e.g. routine R&D versus cutting-edge R&D. Financial...