We investigate the effect of the 20 largest – in terms of insured losses – man-made or natural disasters on the insurance industry. We show via an event study that insurance markets worldwide are quite resilient to unexpected losses to capital and are even outperforming the general market...

It has long been known that the estimated persistence parameter in the GARCH(1,1) - model is biased upwards when the parameters of the model are not constant throughout the sample. The present paper explains the mechanics of this behavior for a particular class of estimates of the model...

The paper considers the Markov-Switching GARCH(1,1)-model with time-varying transition probabilities. It derives su?cient conditions for the square of the process to display long memory and provides some additional intuition for the empirical observation that estimated GARCH-parameters often sum...

We investigate the OLS-based estimator s2 of the disturbance variance in the standard linear regression model with cross section data when the disturbances are homoskedastic, but spatially correlated. For the most popular model of spatially autoregressive disturbances, we show that s2 can be...

We show that the F-test can be both liberal and conservative in the context of a particular type of nonspherical behaviour induced by spatial autocorrelation, and that the conservative variant is more likely to occur for extreme values of the spatial autocorrelation parameter. In particular, it...

Gesundheitsökonomen nehmen Stellung zu den „Eckpunkten zu einer Gesundheitsreform“ der Koalitionsparteien vom 4. Juli 2006.

We consider the finite sample power of various tests against serial correlation in the disturbances of a linear regression when these disturbances follow a stationary long memory process. It emerges that the power depends on the form of the regressor matrix and that, for the Durbin-Watson test...

Wirtschaftsdaten als Objekte von Prognosen sind meist metrischer Natur: Arbeitslosenzahlen, Aktienkurse, Umsätze, Erlöse usw., alle sind quantitative Variable, bei denen sich Prognosen und realisierte Werte, wie auch konkurrierende Prognosen, leicht vergleichen lassen. Anders die Lage bei...

We consider 1927 borrowers from 54 countries who had a credit rating by both Moody's and S&P as of the end of 1998, and their subsequent default history up to the end of 2002. Viewing bond ratings as predicted probabilities of default, we show that it is unlikely that both agencies are well...