Under the Basel II regulatory framework non-negligible statistical problems arise when backtesting risk measures. In this setting backtests often become infeasible due to a low number of violations leading to heavy size distortions. According to Escanciano and Olmo (2010, 2011) these problems...

The accuracy of measuring credit risk directly decides on the interest on credit, which has to be paid when raising a credit, and the amount of capital to keep in reserve by a firm. The structural credit risk model proposed by Merton (1974) lays the groundwork for the assessment of a firm's...

This paper shows that public provision of private goods may be justified on pure efficiency grounds in an environment where individuals have relative consumption concerns. By providing private goods, governments directly intervene in the consumption structure, thereby having an instrument to...

Both in science as in politics, the euro project is an intensively discussed topic. While some predict maintaining it will lead europe in a glorious future, others consider it to be the evil ruining the old continent. The present work addresses the question how common pool ressources, that are...

In this paper, we derive a semiparametric estimation procedure for the sample selection model when some covariates are endogenous. Our approach is to augment the main equation of interest with a control function which accounts for sample selectivity as well as endogeneity of covariates. In...

There is a growing consensus that part of the surge in government bond spreads during the EMU debt crisis can be explained by wake-up-call contagion. Evidence on pure contagion however is very mixed and there are no insights into the dynamics of these effects. As a contribution to fill this gap,...

Nowadays foreign exchange interventions occur in emerging market economies whereas empirical studies on interventions mainly refer to advanced economies. However, interventions in emerging markets are different from those in advanced economies: they occur "regularly" and central banks have...

This study tests for a break in the persistence of EMU government bond yield spreads examining data from France, Italy and Spain and using German interest rates as a kind of benchmark. The results reported here provide evidence for breaks between 2006 and 2008. The persistence of the yield...

We analyze the role of personality in occupational choice and wages using data from Germany for the years 1992 to 2009. Characterizing personality by use of seven complementary measures, the empirical findings show that it is an important determinant of occupational choice. Associated with that,...

In recent contributions, Weizsäcker (2014) and Summers (2014) maintain that mature economies accumulate too much capital. They suggest large and lasting public deficits as a remedy. This paper argues that overaccumulation cannot occur in an economy with land. It presents novel data of aggregate...