The aim of this paper is to extract mathematically talented students out of a group of arbitrary high school students. We do this by applying a stepwise discriminant analysis modified for ordinal data to the results of German high school students at the international mathematics competition...

When calculating the cost of entering into a credit transaction the predominant stochastic component is the expected loss. Often in the credit business the one-year probability of default of the liable counterpart is the only reliable parameter. We use this probability to calculating the exact...

In this paper we compare the price of an option with one year maturity of the German stock index DAX for several volatility models including long memory and leverage effects. We compute the price by applying a present value scheme as well as the Black-Scholes and Hull-White formulas which...

We provide a method for distinguishing long-range dependence from deterministic trends such as structural breaks. The method is based on the comparison of standard log-periodogram regression estimation of the memory parameter with its tapered counterpart. The difference of these estimators...

Markov Chains are introduced by only assuming some knowledge of the notion of probability. The modelling of a situation in a context of biology gives the opportunity to students to approach various concepts of probability theory themselves.