The article tests for a random walk in European equity style indexes. After briefly introducing the efficient market hypothesis, equity styles in general and the used statistical techniques (Variance Ratio Test and modified Rescaled Range Test) it is shown that a random walk in European equity...

Are financial markets efficient? One proposition that seems to contradict this is Shiller’s finding of excess volatility in asset prices and its resulting rejection of the discounted cash flow model. This paper replicates Shiller’s approach for a different data set and extends his analysis...

One empirical argument that has been around for some time and that clearly contra- dicts equity market efficiency is that market prices seem too volatile to be optimal estimates of the present value of future discounted cash flows. Based on this, it is deduced that systematic pricing errors...

The Paper analyses both the Conference Board as well as the OECD Leading Indicators concerning their forecasting properties of overall economic activity. For this purpose the two indicators are introduced separately and several in-sample and out-of-sample tests are being conducted. The main...

A common joke among economist is: Why has god created meteorologists? To make the forecasts of economist look less bad! At the heart of this joke stands the critique that economic forecasts are notoriously inaccurate. Prediction Markets are an attempt to improve these forecasts by aggregating...

In recent times increasing house prices have been credited with a stong positive influence on aggre-gate consumption. But it is questionable in how far higher prices are at all able to lift the purchasing power of the economy as whole: The seller’s profit of a high price, equals the buyer’s...