East German wages have been below the West German wage level since unification. Moreover, the East-West wage gap implied by the contractual wagesspecified in collective wage agreements is drifting ever further apart from the wagegap in terms of effective wages. This paper looks at the role of...

GARCH models are widely used in financial econometrics. However, we show by mean of a simple simulation example that the GARCH approach may lead to a serious model misspecification if the assumption of stationarity is violated. In particular, the well known integrated GARCH effect can be...

The first stages of any data analysis are to get to know the aims of the studyand to get to know the data. In this study the main goal is to predict acompany´s chances of going bankrupt based on its recent financial returns...

In his paper we introduce a quantile-based risk measure for multivariate financial positions: the vector-valued Tail-conditional-expectation (T CE). We adopt the framework proposed by Jouini, Meddeb, and Touzi [9] to deal with multi-assets portfolios when one accounts for frictions in the...

We study the problem of finding the minimal initial capital needed in order to hedge without risk a barrier option when the vector of proportions of wealth invested in each risky asset is constraint to lie in a closed convex domain...

Risk management and the thorough understanding of the relations betweenfinancial markets and the standard theory of macroeconomics have always been among the topics most addressed by researchers, both financial mathematicians and economists. This work aims at explaining investors behavior from a...

We analyze the two goals behind the European Bologna Process of increasing student mobility: enabling graduates to develop multi-cultural skills and increasing the quality of universities. We isolate three effects: 1) a competition effect that raises quality; 2) a free rider effect that lowers...

Due to its ability to allow and account for similarities between pairs of alternatives, the nested logit model is increasingly used in practical applications. However the fact that there are two different specifications of the nested logit model has not received adequate attention. The utility...

Graphical data representation is an important tool for model selection in bankruptcy analysis since the problem is highly non-linear and its numericalrepresentation is much less transparent. In classical rating models a convenientrepresentation of ratings in a closed form is possible reducing...

This paper addresses the question of the British state of convergence towards the Euro area, compared to the USA. Economically, the analysis is based on dependences in the money and capital markets, namely the uncovered interest parity (UIP) and the expectation hypothesis of the term structure...