The low capital mobility among OECD countries, signalled by a high saving-investment (SI) relation and known as the Feldstein-Horioka puzzle, has triggered a lively discussion in the empirical literature. In this paper, we compare between, pooled, time and country dependent specifications of the...

The present thesis comprises two rather independent chapters. In general, the diagnosis and quantification of dependence is a major aim of econometric studies. Along these lines, the concept of dependence serves as an encompassing framework to analyze time series with two very different...

Standard panel unit root tests (PURTs) are not robust to breaks in innovation variances. Consequently, recent papers have proposed PURTs that are pivotal in the presence of volatility shifts. The applicability of these tests, however, has been restricted to cases where the data contains only an...

In this study we forecast the term structure of FIBOR/EURIBOR swap rates by means of recursive vector autoregressive (VAR) models. In advance, a principal components analysis (PCA) is adopted to reduce the dimensionality of the term structure. To evaluate exante forecasting performance for...

The paper proposes a data driven adaptive model selection strategy. The selection crite- rion measures economic exante forecasting content by means of trading implied cash flows. Empirical evidence suggests that the proposed strategy is neither exposed to selection bias nor to the risk of...

Microfoundations of the euro's effect on euro area trade hinge on the timing, the speed and the size of adjustment in trade costs. We estimate timing, speed and size of adjustment in trade costs for sectoral trade data. Our approach allows for sector specific impacts of trade costs on sectoral...

Microfoundations of the euro's effect on euro area trade hinge on the timing, the speed and the size of adjustment in trade costs. We estimate timing, speed and size of adjustment in trade costs for sectoral trade data. Our approach allows for sector specific impacts of trade costs on sectoral...

Noting that many economic variables display occasional shifts in their second order moments, we investigate the performance of homogenous panel unit root tests in the presence of permanent volatility shifts. It is shown that in this case, panel unit root tests derived under time invariant...

The labor market effects of the recent financial and economic crisis are rather heterogeneous across countries and regions. Such differences in labor market performance among industrialized countries are an issue of ongoing research. The objective of this paper is to analyse labor market...