This study analyzes current regulation with respect to the use of derivatives and leverage by mutual funds in the U.S. and Germany. After presenting a detailed overview of U.S. and German regulations, this study thoroughly compares the level of flexibility funds have in both countries. I find...

The present study addresses the economic interpretation of stock market volatility. We argue that its character is inherently ambivalent, being considered as an indicator of either information flow or uncertainty.We discriminate between these views by measuring the fraction of price changes that...

Individuals in most industrialized countries have to make investment decisions throughout their adult life span to save for their retirement. These decisions substantially affect their living standards in old age. Research on cognitive aging has already demonstrated several changes in cognitive...

We present a new partial equilibrium theory of price adjustment, based on consumer loss aversion. In line with prospect theory, the consumers’ perceived utility losses from price increases are weighted more heavily than the perceived utility gains from price decreases of equal magnitude. Price...

We establish estimation methods to determine co-jumps in multivariate high-frequency data with nonsynchronous observations and market microstructure noise. The ex-post quadratic covariation of the signal part, which is modeled by an Itˆo-semimartingale, is estimated with a locally adaptive...

The development of shadow banking system in China catalyzes the expansion of banks’ off-balance-sheet activities, resulting in a distortion of China’s traditional credit expansion and underestimation of its commercial banks’ overall risk. This paper is the first to incorporate banks’...

We propose a methodology for forecasting the systemic impact of financial institutions in interconnected systems. Utilizing a five-year sample including the 2008/9 financial crisis, we demonstrate how the approach can be used for timely systemic risk monitoring of large European banks and...

We use transfer entropy to quantify information flows between financial mar- kets and propose a suitable bootstrap procedure for statistical inference. Trans- fer entropy is a model-free measure designed as the Kullback-Leibler distance of transition probabilities. Our approach allows to...

We introduce a copula-based dynamic model for multivariate processes of (non-negative) high-frequency trading variables revealing time-varying conditional variances and correlations. Modeling the variables’ conditional mean processes using a multiplicative error model we map the resulting...

By any measure, the European Monetary Union and the European Union are in a deep hole. In the summer of 2011 we came uncomfortably close to an uncontrolled sovereign default of an EU country, a member of the European Monetary Union, hardly ten years after the common currency project was...