This paper studies the long-run relationship between consumption, asset wealth and income – the consumption-wealth ratio – in Germany, based on data from 1980 to 2003. Earlier papers for the Anglo-Saxon economies have documented that departures of these three variables from their common...

We employ a life-cycle model with income risk to analyze how tax-deferred individual accounts affect households' savings for retirement. We consider voluntary accounts as opposed to mandatory accounts with minimum contribution rates. We contrast add-on accounts with carve-out accounts that...

We compared forecasts of stock market volatility based on real-time and revised macroeconomic data. To this end, we used a new dataset on monthly real-time macroeconomic variables for Germany. The dataset covers the period 1994-2005. We used a statistical, a utility-based, and an options-based...

We report results on the ex ante predictability of monthly excess stock returns in Germany using real-time and revised macroeconomic data. Our real-time macroeconomic data cover the period 1994-2005. We report three results. 1) Real-time macroeconomic data did not contribute much to ex ante...

This paper analyzes the individual bidding behaviour of German banks in the money market auctions conducted by the ECB from the beginning of the third quarter of 2000 to the end of the first quarter of 2001. Our approach takes a variety of characteristics of the individual banks into account. In...