Since attrition in the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) has cumulated to a considerable extent, there is concern that attrition biases empirical analysis. In this paper we compare the performance of four different strategies for estimating an earnings equation in the presence of panel...

The histogram location approach has been proposed by Kahn (1997) to estimate the fraction of wage cuts prevented by downward nominal wage rigidity. In this paper, we analyze the validity of the approach by means of a simulation study which yielded evidence of unbiasedness but also of potential...

The study analyses the unconditional distribution of monthly S&P 500 stock index returns for the long-run time period 1871-2004. The return distribution can be adequately described by a mixture of two Gaussian normal distributions. However, when analysing sub-samples of this long-time horizon,...

Banks face a tradeoff between diversifying and focusing their loan portfolio. In this paper we carry out an empirical study for the German market to shed light on the question whether or not the benefits of risk sharing outweigh those of specialization. We use data from the Bundesbank's...

The paper investigates the increasing ratio of financial asset aquisition to net fixed capital formation using the financial account statistic of the Deutsche Bundesbank. An increasing ratio is measured for all german sectors as well as for the producing enterprises. Using descriptive methods...

Several empirical papers find that firms a priori classified as liquidity constrained exhibit greater sensitivity of investment to cash flow than those classified as unconstrained. In this paper we analyse the robustness of these findings in different ways. We use three different methods...

The paper is concerned with the question of whether the pricing of US stocks has been efficient in terms of the present value model. The MTAR model used in the context of market efficiency is extended by means of a rolling window estimation strategy. This rolling MTAR analysis revealed that the...

We analyze wage growth and changes in wage inequality in eleven European countries between 1994 and 2001. The data base used throughout is the User Data Base (UDB) of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). The decomposition analysis is carried out independently for both genders....

We suggest a new parametric approach to estimate the extent of downward nominal wage rigidity in ten European countries between 1995 and 2001. The database used throughout is the User Data Base of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). The proposed approach is based on the generalized...