Principal component analysis denotes a popular algorithmic technique to dimension reduction and factor extraction. Spatial variants have been proposed to account for the particularities of spatial data, namely spatial heterogeneity and spatial autocorrelation, and we present a novel approach...

Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz (1868 - 1931) was a European statistician. His scientific work covered theoretical economics, stochastics, mathematical statistics and radiology, today we would call him a cross disciplinary scientist. With his clear views on mathematical principles with their...

It was evident that credit default swap (CDS) spreads have been highly correlated during the recent financial crisis. Motivated by this evidence, this study attempts to investigate the extent to which CDS markets across regions, maturities and credit ratings have integrated more in crisis. By...

There is consensus that the recent financial crisis revolved around a crash of the short-term credit market. Yet there is no agreement around the necessary policies to prevent another credit freeze. In this experiment we test the effects that contract length (i.e. maturity mismatch) has on the...

This study analyzes current regulation with respect to the use of derivatives and leverage by mutual funds in the U.S. and Germany. After presenting a detailed overview of U.S. and German regulations, this study thoroughly compares the level of flexibility funds have in both countries. I find...

We study ex post information rents in sequential screening models where the agent receives private ex ante and ex post information. The principal has to pay ex post information rents for preventing the agent to coordinate lies about his ex ante and ex post information. When the agent's ex ante...

We introduce ex post participation constraints in the standard sequential screening model. This captures the presence of consumer withdrawal rights as, for instance, mandated by EU regulation of "distance sales contracts". With such additional constraints, the optimal contract is static and,...

A central issue in climate policy is the question whether long-term targets for green- house gas emissions should be adopted. This paper analyzes strategic effects related to the timing of such commitments. Using a two-country model, we identify a redistributive effect that undermines long-term...

We study a general class of semiparametric estimators when the in nite-dimensional nuisance parameters include a conditional expectation function that has been estimated nonparametrically using generated covariates. Such estimators are used frequently to e.g. estimate nonlinear models with...

In practice, multivariate dependencies between extreme risks are often only assessed in a pairwise way. We propose a test to detect when tail dependence is truly high{dimensional and bivariate simplifications would produce misleading results. This occurs when a significant portion of the...