Diese Arbeit besteht aus vier Essays, die empirische und methodische Beiträge zu den Gebieten der Finanzmarktökonomik und der Makroökonomik liefern. Der erste Essay beschäftigt sich mit der Spezifikation der Investoren verfügbaren Informationsmenge in Tests bedingter Kapitalmarktmodelle. Im...

This paper discusses the consumption-wealth relationship. Following the recent influential work of Lettau and Ludvigson [e.g. Lettau and Ludvigson (2001), (2004)], we use data on consumption, assets and labor income and a vector error correction framework. Key ndings of their work are that...

This paper introduces a new model of trend (or underlying) inflation. In contrast to many earlier approaches, which allow for trend inflation to evolve according to a random walk, ours is a bounded model which ensures that trend inflation is constrained to lie in an interval. The bounds of this...

The non-negativity constraint on inventories imposed on the rational expectations theory of speculative storage implies that the conditional mean and variance of commodity prices are non-linear in lagged prices and have a kink at a threshold point. In this paper, the structural parameters of...

Forecasting using "diffusion indices" has received a good deal of attention in recent years. The idea is to use the common factors estimated from a large panel of data to help forecast the series of interest. This paper assesses the extent to which the forecasts are influenced by (i) how the...