Substantial cross-national differences in poverty alleviation are well documented, but theextent to which different parts of the social transfer system account for this variation is still relatively unexamined. This study analyses the redistributive effects of specific social policy institutions...

Implied volatility indices should have information about risk parameters, once they are cleansed of the influence of normal volatility dynamics and macro-economic uncertainty. Building on intuition from the dynamic asset pricing literature, we uncover unobserved risk aversion and fundamental...

Im Herbst 2002 wurde unter sächsischen Klein- und Mittelständischen Unternehmen eine empirische Studie zum Thema "Erfolg auf dem amerikanischen Markt" durchgeführt. Ein Teil der in einer Fragebogenaktion gewonnenen Ergebnisse wird in diesem Arbeitspapier vorge-stellt. Die Ergebnisse beziehen...

Behavior, attitudes, and values differ extremely throughout the world. Whenever two members of different groups such as cultures, nations, or societies interact, such differences become a determining factor for the process of interaction. When thinking of such areas where interactions among...

Good data on the size and composition of the independent contractor workforce are elusive, with household survey and administrative tax data often disagreeing on levels and trends. We carried out a series of focus groups to learn how self-employed independent contractors speak about their work....

Any measure of unobserved inflation uncertainty relies on specific assumptions which are most likely not fulfilled completely. This calls into question whether an individual measure delivers a reliable signal. To reduce idiosyncratic measurement error, we propose using common information...

Banks should evaluate whether a borrower is likely to default. I apply several techniques in the extensive mathematical literature of stochastic optimal control/dynamic programming to derive an optimal debt in an environment where there are risks on both the asset and liabilities sides. The...

This paper analyses the sectoral distribution of US investment across EU member countries. We attempt to determine whether investment is sectorally concentrated by country and whether there seems to be any evidence of increased sectoral specialisation in US investment as the EU market has become...