Voting power methodology offers insights to understand coalition building in collective decision making. Using cooperative game theory, Banzhaf (1965) developed an index to capture the numerical importance of voters in coalition building. This voting power index is still widely used today in...

Voting power methodology offers insights to understand coalition building in collective decision making. Using cooperative game theory, Banzhaf (1965) developed an index to capture the numerical importance of voters in coalition building. This voting power index is still widely used today in...

Austria has probably the world’s highest pension expenditures relative to its economic size, largely because of the generosity of its pension system. This paper examines the institutional setup of the Austrian pension system and projects its future development based on current policies. The...

This paper examines empirical determinants of private saving for a sample of economies in Southeast Asia and Latin America over the period 1975–95. It uses panel estimations to establish relationships between private saving rates and a range of policy and nonpolicy variables. The findings show...

This paper explores the problem of effective taxation at the lower end of the income scale in Germany. For the recipients of social income maintenance--currently about 1.8 million nationals--effective taxation consists not only of the explicit taxation through the tax code but also of the...

In this paper we consider two cases of pairs trading strategies: a conditional statistical arbitrage method and an implicit statistical arbitrage method. We use a simulation-based Bayesian procedure for predicting stable ratios, defined in a cointegration model, of pairs of stock prices. We show...

We derive the optimal hedging ratios for a portfolio of assets driven by a Cointegrated Vector Autoregressive model with general cointegration rank. Our hedge is optimal in the sense of minimum variance portfolio. We consider a model that allows for the hedges to be cointegrated with the hedged...

A novel simulation-based methodology is proposed to test the validity of a set of marginal time series models, where the dependence structure between the time series is taken "directly" from the observed data. The procedure is useful when one wants to summarize the test results for several time...