The 1990s were the most prosperous decade in U.S. economic history. The paper analyses to which extent this period fits into preceding cyclical experience. This is done by classifying the period 1991-12 to 2000-12 with the help of a 4-phase classification scheme based on multivariate...

Trust or likewise "confidence" (the term preferred in this paper) are notions which have received considerable attention by economists in the last 8-10 years. In this contribution, much emphasis is put on the understanding what we really mean by "confidence", what the differences between...

Rising wage inequality in the U.S. and Britain (especially in the 1980s) and rising continental European unemployment (with rather stable wage inequality) have led to a popular view in the economics profession that these two phenomena are related to negative relative demand shocks against the...

This paper uses an empirical connection between real stock market indices of Germany and the USA for forecasting corresponding returns. We are starting from the random walk as the traditional forecasting model in stock market applications, extending it by co-integration. Since the cointegrating...

Knowledge flows within and across countries should be carriers of important learning spillovers. We use data on 1.5 million patents and 4.5 million citations to analyze knowledge flows across 147 subnational regions. We estimate that only 15% of average knowledge is learned outside the average...

Dieses Papier untersucht, inwieweit Multifaktormodelle nach Fama/French (1993) am deutschen Aktienmarkt die zeitliche Streuung von Renditen abbilden und Portfolio-Renditen im Querschnitt erklären können. Analog zu vergleichbar angelegten Studien am US-amerikanischen, kanadischen und britischen...

This paper investigates the effects of macroeconomic volatility on nonfinancial firms cash holding behavior. Using an augmented cash bufferstock model, we demonstrate that an increase in macroeconomic volatility will cause the crosssectional distribution of firms cashtoasset ratios to narrow. We...

This paper presents and compares several time-series models for returns of broadbased stock indices. These models nest a nonlinear asymmetric GARCH (NGARCH) model as a special case. Some of these models are empirically motivated ad-hoc specifications others are derived from a representative...

Owners of private companies are often highly underdiversified which exposes them to idiosyncratic risk. We investigate the consequences of underdiversification at the company level. Information on US companies and their owners is obtained from the Survey of Consumer Finances and the Survey of...

A model is presented for simulating the tax burden on highly skilled manpower. The effective average tax rate, defined as the relative wedge between total remuneration and disposable income, is computed. Income and payroll taxes and social security contributions not yielding an equivalent...