This paper investigates the design of a leniency policy to fight corporate crime. We explicitly take into account the agency problem within the firm. We model this through a three-tier hierarchy: authority, shareholder, and manager. The manager may breach the law and report evidence to the...

We present a statistical investigation on the domain of sex-related homicides. As general sociological and psychological theory on this specific type of crime is incomplete or even lacking, a data-driven approach is implemented. In detail, graphical modelling is applied to learn the dependency...

Based on administrative data from the federal employment office in Germany, we apply matching techniques to estimate the stepping-stone function of temporary agency work for the unemployed, i.e. its short-run and long-run effects on their future employment prospects. Our results show that...

The vast majority of regions in West Germany, and the EU, have become more similar in terms of per-capita income and productivity between 1980 and 2000. But a number of rich areas - generally large agglomerations - have succeeded in departing from this trend of convergence. They are continuing...

We investigate the problem of calibrating an exponential Lévy model based on market prices of vanilla options. We show that this inverse problem is in general severely ill-posed and we derive exact minimax rates of convergence. The estimation procedure we propose is based on the explicit...

East German wages have been below the West German wage level since unification. Moreover, the East-West wage gap implied by the contractual wages specified in collective wage agreements is drifting ever further apart from the wage gap in terms of effective wages. This paper looks at the role of...

The purpose of this paper is to sort out firm-related differences from effects that result from different economic structures. A non-parametric decomposition is used to analyse firm level difference between the wage spread in the two major regions of unified Germany. If firm-specific effects...

Die Gestaltung der Produktpalette war ein zentrale Herausforderung für ostdeutsche Unternehmer nach der Wende. Spezialisierung oder diffuse Generalistenstrategie war die Frage. Welche Strategie sich durchgesetzt hat und ob der Anschluss an den Westen gelang, wird in dieser Arbeit erstmals auf...

In the ideal Black-Scholes world, financial time series are assumed 1) stationary (time homogeneous) and 2) having conditionally normal distribution given the past. These two assumptions have been widely-used in many methods such as the RiskMetrics, one risk management method considered as...

We consider the problem of estimating the conditional quantile of a time series at time t given observations of the same and perhaps other time series available at time t - 1. We discuss sieve estimates which are a nonparametric versions of the Koenker-Bassett regression quantiles and do not...