A desired characteristic of composite indicators is sensitivity to major adverse events. This paper explores how major civil wars and the 2004 tsunami have influenced Human Development Index (HDI) and Environmental Performance Index (EPI) index values of the affected countries, respectively. The...

Given independent observations of the income or the expense variable of some population, with underlying distribution G, given a poverty line Z, we introduce a general form of poverty measures used by economists to monitor the welfare evolution of this population. This latter includes the most...

Given independent observations of the income or the expense variable of some population, with underlying distribution G, given a poverty line Z, we study the Kakwani class of poverty measures. This measure is one of the most important tools for monitoring poverty in Economics. Here, we complete...

In 2020, Berlin enacted a rigorous rent-control policy: the “Mietendeckel” (rent freeze), aiming to stop rapidly growing rental prices. We evaluate this newly enacted but old-fashionably designed policy by analyzing its immediate supply-side effects. Using a rich pool of rent advertisements...

This paper proposes a general statistical framework for systemic financial stress indexes. Several existing index designs can be represented as special cases. We introduce a daily variant of the ECB’s CISS for the euro area and the US. The CISS aggregates a representative set of stress...

German Abstract: Soll eine Patientengruppe über Themen welche für die Zielgruppe von Interesse sind bloggen? Zu diesem Thema gibt es verschiedene Meinungen. Das Ziel dieser Studie war es mit Hilfe quantitativer Daten die Diskussion über Patientenblogs neu anzuregen. Dabei wurde untersucht wie...

This study shows how to construct monetary aggregates using a procedure to adjust the simple-sum, Divisia and empirical monetary aggregates to be consistent with weak separability. The corresponding adjusted monetary aggregates have considerable leading indicator information and provide the most...

The prices of wine is a key topic for market participants interested in valuing their stock, including dealers, restaurants or consumers who may be interested in optimizing their purchases. As a closely related issue, re-valuation is the need to regularly update the value of a stock. This need...

Price indices for heterogenous goods such as real estate or fine art constitute crucial information for institutional or private investors considering alternative investments in times of financial markets turmoil. Classical mean-variance analysis of alternative investments has been hampered by...

A new heteroskedastic hedonic regression model is suggested which takes into account time-varying volatility and is applied to a blue chips art market. A nonparametric local likelihood estimator is proposed, and this is more precise than the often used dummy variables method. The empirical...