This study analyzes the loss potential arising from investments into CDS for a sample of large U.S. and German mutual funds. Further, it investigates whether the comments funds make on CDS use in periodic fund reports are consistent with the disclosed CDS holdings. For several funds in the U.S.,...

Numerous papers have tried to understand housing's role in the economy and have not reached an agreement. In this paper we turn to the asymmetric relationship between housing and the overall economic activity. We find that the relation between building permits and GDP is regime-dependent....

A growing body of literature argues that the financial cycle is considerably longer in duration and larger in amplitude than the business cycle and that its distinguishing features became more pronounced over time. This paper proposes an empirical approach suitable to test these hypothe- ses. We...

Are financial cycles an international phenomenon, and, if so, how do financial cycles interact? This letter provides new evidence for the US and the UK. Considering the properties of the data in both the time and the frequency domains, we find a strong relation between the financial cycles of...

We propose the use of a local autoregressive (LAR) model for adaptive estimation and forecasting of three of China's key macroeconomic variables: GDP growth, inflation and the 7-day interbank lending rate. The approach takes into account possible structural changes in the data-generating process...

This study provides a comprehensive overview of the use of credit default swaps by U.S. corporate bond funds and analyzes in detail whether certain characteristics of managers, in addition to the fundamentals of a fund, determine how their use these credit derivatives. Results suggest that a...

There are legal grounds to hear competitors in merger control proceedings, and competitor involvement has gained significance. To what extent this is economically sensible is our question. The competition authority applies some welfare standard while the competitor cares about its own profit. In...

This paper introduces a Divisia monetary aggregate for Germany and explores its information content for the Great Recession. Divisia money and the corresponding simple sum aggregate are highly correlated in normal times but begin to diverge before the crisis. Out of sample forecast analysis and...

This paper proposes a test for missing at random (MAR). The MAR assumption is shown to be testable given instrumental variables which are independent of response given potential outcomes. A nonparametric testing procedure based on integrated squared distance is proposed. The statistic's...

Well-anchored inflation expectations have become a key indicator for the credibility of a central bank's inflation target. Since the outbreak of the recent financial crisis, the existence and the degree of de-anchoring of U.S. inflation expectations have been under debate. This paper introduces...