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...

Using a local adaptive Forward Intensities Approach (FIA) we investigate multiperiod corporate defaults and other delisting schemes. The proposed approach is fully datadriven and is based on local adaptive estimation and the selection of optimal estimation windows. Time-dependent model...

A flexible statistical approach for the analysis of time-varying dynamics of transaction data on financial markets is here applied to intra-day trading strategies. A local adaptive technique is used to successfully predict financial time series, i.e., the buyer and the seller-initiated trading...

In this paper, we give an overview of the state-of-the-art in the econometric literature on the modeling of so-called financial point processes. The latter are associated with the random arrival of specific financial trading events, such as transactions, quote updates, limit orders or price...

We propose a local adaptive multiplicative error model (MEM) accommodating timevarying parameters. MEM parameters are adaptively estimated based on a sequential testing procedure. A data-driven optimal length of local windows is selected, yielding adaptive forecasts at each point in time....

The implied volatility became one of the key issues in modern quantitative finance, since the plain vanilla option prices contain vital information for pricing and hedging of exotic and illiquid options. European plain vanilla options are nowadays widely traded, which results in a great amount...

A primary goal in modelling the implied volatility surface (IVS) for pricing and hedging aims at reducing complexity. For this purpose one fits the IVS each day and applies a principal component analysis using a functional norm. This approach, however, neglects the degenerated string structure...

After 20 years of transition from an economy integrated in an exchange scheme of planned economies towards an open market economy based on the ideas of competition, we ask whether East German firms succeeded in finding their place in the international division of labour. We concentrate on the...

This paper studies polar sets of anisotropic Gaussian random elds, i.e. sets which a Gaussian random eld does not hit almost surely. The main assumptions are that the eigenvalues of the covariance matrix are bounded from below and that the canonical metric associated with the Gaussian random eld...

In this article, we present new ideas concerning Non-Gaussian Component Analysis (NGCA). We use the structural assumption that a high-dimensional random vector X can be represented as a sum of two components - a lowdimensional signal S and a noise component N. We show that this assumption...