We analyse the adjustment of retail and services prices in a period of low inflation, using a set of individual price data from the German Consumer Price Index that covers the years 1998 to 2003. We strong find evidence of time- and statedependent price adjustment. Most importantly, the...

We analyse the adjustment of retail and services prices in a period of low inflation, using a set of individual price data from the German Consumer Price Index which covers the years 1998 to 2003. We strong find evidence of time- and state-dependent price adjustment. Most importantly, the...

Since the seminal work of Mandelbrot (1963), alpha-stable distributions with infinite variance have been regarded as a more realistic distributional assumption than the normal distribution for some economic variables, especially financial data. After providing a brief survey of theoretical...

Using Monte Carlo simulations, we compare the forecasting performance of the single equation error correction model (SEECM) with that of the (misspecified) difference autoregressive model with exogenous variables (ARX). The main result of the article is that the SEECM produces superior forecasts...

In this article, we apply the Log Periodic Power Law (LPPL), introduced by Johansen <italic>et al.</italic> (2000), for capturing the recent stock market crash in the German stock index (Deutscher Aktien Index, DAX). The contribution of this article consists not only in describing the historical crash by the...

We examine the asymptotic properties of the coefficient of determination, R2, in models with α-stable   random variables. If the regressor and error term share the same index of stability α2, we show that the R2  statistic does not converge to a constant but has a nondegenerate distribution...

In this paper, we construct a single composite financial stress indicator (FSI) which aims to predict developments in the real economy in the euro area. Our FSI was shown to perform better than the Euro STOXX 50 volatility index for the recent banking crisis and the euro-area sovereign debt...

Since Mandelbrot's seminal work (1963), alpha-stable distributions with infinite variance have been regarded as a more realistic distributional assumption than the normal distribution for some economic variables, especially financial data. After providing a brief survey of theoretical results on...

In this paper, using the Monte Carlo (MC) method we propose an estimation and (at the same time) a test procedure for the stability parameter of a-stable distributions. One powerful advantage of the MC method is that it provides an exact significance level for finite samples, whose distribution...

Under the symmetric á-stable distributional assumption for the disturbances, Blattberg et al (1971) consider unbiased linear estimators for a regression model with non-stochastic regressors. We consider both the rate of convergence to the true value and the asymptotic distribution of the...