This paper proposes a new approach of forecasting prospective comparative advantages based on relative prices differences between countries in the context of economic liberalization. An empirical analysis based on the example of Central and East European countries that have already passed the...

The rising trends both in drug addiction and crime rates are of major public concern in Germany. Surprisingly, the economic theory of crime seems to ignore the drugs/crime nexus, whereas the criminological lit- erature considers illicit drug use a main reason of criminal activities. This paper...

Innovations, be they radical new products or technology improvements are widely recognized as a key factor of economic growth. To identify the factors triggering innovative activities is a main concern for economic theory and empirical analysis. As the number of hypotheses is large, the process...

Value at risk (VaR) has become a standard measure of portfolio risk over the last decade. It even became one of the corner stones in the Basel II accord about banks' equity requirements. Nevertheless, the practical application of the VaR concept suffers from two problems: how to estimate VaR and...

The Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter has become a widely used tool for detrending integrated time series in applied econometric analysis. Even though the theoretical time series literature sums up an extensive catalogue of severe criticism against an econometric analysis of HP filtered data, the...

Threshold Accepting (TA) is a powerful optimization heuristic from the class of stochastic local search algorithms. It has been applied successfully to different optimization problems in statistics and econometrics, including the uniform design problem. Using the latter application as example,...

The convergence of estimators, e.g. maximum likelihood estimators, for increasing sample size is well understood in many cases. However, even when the rate of convergence of the estimator is known, practical application is hampered by the fact, that the estimator cannot always be obtained at...

Standard measures of consumer price inflation are based on a bundle of representative goods. It is well known that this approach might overstate inflation for new products and products with fast increasing quality. For this reason, hedonic adjustment methods have been proposed and introduced in...

Gegenstand dieses Beitrags ist eine quantitativ orientierte Diskussion einiger Wirkungen einer Umstrukturierung des Steuersystems anhand der neuesten und wesentlich erweiterten Version des Konstanzer aggregierten Ungleichgewichtsmodells für die westdeutsche Volkswirtschaft für den Zeitraum von...

Different stochastic simulation methods are used in order to check the robustness of the outcome of policy simulations with a macroeconometric model. A macroeconometric disequilibriummodel of the West German economy is used to analyze a reform proposal for the tax system. The model was estimated...