Weather influences our daily lives and choices and has an enormous impact on cooperate revenues and earnings. Weather derivatives differ from most derivatives in that the underlying weather cannot be traded and their market is relatively illiquid. The weather derivative market is therefore...

East-West migration in Germany peaked at the beginning of the 90s although the average wage gap between Eastern and Western Germany continues to average about 25%. We analyze the propensity to migrate using microdata from the German Socioeconomic Panel. Fitting a parametric Generalized Linear...

Pricing kernels implicit in option prices play a key role in assessing the risk aversion over equity returns. We deal with nonparametric estimation of the pricing kernel (Empirical Pricing Kernel) given by the ratio of the risk-neutral density estimator and the subjective density estimator. The...

This chapter deals with nonparametric estimation of the risk neutral density. We present three different approaches which do not require parametric functional assumptions on the underlying asset price dynamics nor on the distributional form of the risk neutral density. The first estimator is a...

Based on daily VDAX data this paper analyzes the factors governing the movements of implied volatilities of options on the German stock index DAX. Using Principal Components Analysis over the sample period from 1996 to 1997, we derive common factors representing "shift" and "curvature" of the...