We have developed a new test against spurious long memory based on the invariance of long memory parameter to aggregation. By using the local Whittle estimator, the statistic takes the supremum among combinations of paired aggregated series. Simulations show that the test performs good in finite...

Taking into account recent health care reforms in Germany a change of the structure in the provision of HIV health care services seems inevitable. Having this in mind representatives of multiple disciplines met in November 2008 to discuss future health-political and health-economic challenges...

This study examines profits and speculation in the USD/EUR trading of a bank in Germany over a four-month period. Dealing activity at the bank generates profits but speculation does not seem to contribute to this. We find that speculative positions fail to become profitable within a 30-minutes'...

In this paper, we analyze the performance of call centers of financial service providers with two levels of support and a time-dependent overflow mechanism. Waiting calls from the front-office queue flow over to the back office, if a waiting-time limit is reached and at least one back-office...

This paper proposes a new unit root test against a non-linear exponential smooth transition autoregressive (ESTAR) model. The new test is build upon the non-standard testing approach of Abadir and Distaso (2007) who introduce a class of modified statistics for testing joint hypotheses when one...

Does the labeling of tradable products like carpets which have been produced without child labor contribute to decreased vulnerability of poor households and their children? This paper analyzes which factors determine the probability of a child to work in the carpet industry, and examines the...

Hosting the 2006 FIFA World Championship induced a boom in stadium investments in Germany. A second wave of smaller arena constructions can currently be observed across the country. These projects are promoted by smaller clubs of the first and the second Bundesliga, aiming not to fall behind the...

Early warning systems (EWSs) are subject to restrictions that apply to exchange rates in general: fundamentals matter but their influence is small and unstable. Despite this limitation four major lessons emerge: First, EWSs have robust forecasting power and thus help policy-makers to prevent...

When the centre-left government came into power in Germany in 1998, a core promise of the new Chancellor, Schroeder, was to reduce the lack of jobs and to increase welfare. Facing persistently increasing unemployment rates from then on, the government finally launched Hartz IV in 2004; the largest...

In this paper, I examine an inter-temporal exchange economy with a complete financial market. The economy is populated by two heterogeneous investors who differ from each other in their attitudes towards risk. In such a model, a single representative agent can be created who generates the same...