While the Telecommunications Act of 1996 introduces competition into local telephone markets at a national level, prior to the Act many states had already restructured their regulatory methods. In particular, many states allowed for competition in both local service and "local long distance"...

This paper analyses the extent of inter-format retail competition between supermarkets, discounters and drugstores in Germany, using data from the German market for diapers. We estimate a random coefficient logit model at the individual household level. Based on consumer substitution patterns,...

Given various recent antitrust investigations on the retail sector, we deal with uncovering demand systems substitution patterns for a particular market (diapers) to investigate the inter-format competition (supermarkets vs. discounters vs. drugstores). Using the uncovered demand system we...

We propose a model of discrimination in the market for mortgages. The model explains accepted loan applications and determines loan sizes and interest rates simultaneously. A competitive, and a discriminating monopoly version of the model are proposed. Offered interest rates and loan sizes are a...

In this paper we consider the problem of outlet pricing and location in the context of unobserved spatial demand. Our analysis constitutes a scenario wherein capacity-constrained firms set prices conditioned on their location, demand and costs. This enables firms to develop maps of latent demand...

We develop a discrete-time affine stochastic volatility model with time-varying conditional skewness (SVS). Importantly, we disentangle the dynamics of conditional volatility and conditional skewness in a coherent way. Our approach allows current asset returns to be asymmetric conditional on...

We introduce a Nelson-Siegel type interest rate term structure model with the underlying yield factors following autoregressive processes revealing time-varying stochastic volatility. The factor volatilities capture risk inherent to the term structure and are associated with the time-varying...

We characterize the discrete-time arbitrage-free Nelson-Siegel term structure model, prove the uniqueness of the solution for model identification, make specification analysis on its canonical form, and detail the MCMC estimation method with a fast and reliable prior extraction step. Using the...

Recently, Diebold and Li (2003) obtained good forecasting results for yield curves in a reparametrized Nelson-Siegel framework. We analyze similar modeling approaches for price curves of variance swaps that serve nowadays as hedging instruments for options on realized variance.We consider the...

This paper addresses whether the spot exchange rates display long swings and whether these swings are persistent. The null from the naïve random walk theory is that they do not: if they would be unit roots with positive drifts they would converge to infinity. However, if they would be driftless...