Although the standard work week is longer in East than in West Germany, there is a higher incidence and average amount of unpaid overtime worked in the new states. We try to explain the striking differences in unpaid overtime by analyzing the labor supply side. We focus on the investment...

Based on a new panel dataset created in close cooperation with one of the largest temporary help agencies (THAs) in Germany, this paper presents novel evidence on key aspects of temporary agency work, a segment of the labor market that despite its growing importance remains underresearched. In...

We study a bond market model and related term structure of interest rates where prices of zero coupon bonds are driven by a jump-diffusion process. We present a criterion on the deterministic forward rate volatilities under which the short rate process is Markovian and give sufficient conditions...

We obtain an explicit form of fine large deviation theorems for the log-likelihood ratio in testing models with observed Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes and get explicit rates of decrease for error probabilities of Neyman-Pearson, Bayes, and minimax tests. We also give expressions for the rates of...

In this survey, we show that various stochastic optimization problems arising in option theory, in dynamical allocation problems, and in the microeconomic theory of intertemporal consumption choice can all be reduced to the same problem of representing a given stochastic process in terms of...

We consider an optimal stopping problem in a certain model described by a stochastic delay differential equation. We reduce the initial problem to a free-boundary problem of parabolic type and prove the corresponding verification assertion. We also give an example of such an optimal stopping...

Empirical studies of open-market share repurchases in the U.S. typically find a mean abnormal return around the announcement day of about 3%. In Germany share repurchases were highly restricted before May 1998. Since then firms have repurchased shares in the open market more than 250 times....

This paper derives new results on the effects of employing Taylor rules in economies that are subject to real market imperfections such as production externalities. Taylor rules that aggressively respond to output can eliminate sunspot equilibria that arise from the increasing returns. The paper...

The paper finds empirical evidence on the ripple effect of sunspots on the interwar German economy. It identifies a sequence of negative shocks to expectations for the 1927 to 1932 period. The artificial economy predicts the 1928-1932 depression and a long boom from 1933 onwards. Overall, a...

Stochastic Delay Differential Equations (SDDE) are Stochastic Functional Differential Equations with important applications. It is of interest to characterize the L2-stability (stability of second moments) of solutions of SDDE. For the class of linear, scalar SDDE we can show that second...