This study offers the unique opportunity to analyze how an unprecedented crisis such as the September 11 tragedy in uences expected returns and volatility forecasts of individual investors. Via e-mail, we asked a randomly selected group of individual investors with accounts at a German online...

This paper elaborates on the link between financial market volatility and real economic activity. Using monthly data for Germany from 1968 to 1998, we specify GARCH models to capture the variability of stock market prices, of the real exchange rate, and of a long-term and of a short-term rate of...

In this paper, we examine the evolution of the S&P500 returns volatility around market crashes using a Markov-Switching model. We find that volatility typically switches into the high volatility state well before a crash and remains in the high state for a considerable period of time after the...

The unparalleled surge of the crude oil price after 2003 has triggered a heated scientific and public debate about its ultimate causes. Unexpected demand growth particularly from emerging economies appears to be the most prominently supported reason among academics. We study the price dynamics...

I investigate the impact of environmental volatility and the cost of information on the preferred organizational structure, as determined by the allocation of decision rights, the compensation structure of the managers and the degree of operational integration (such as the use of shared...

What is the information content of news-based measures of sentiment? How are they related to economic fluctuations? I construct a sentiment index by measuring the net amount of positive expressions in the full corpus of Economic news articles produced by Reuters covering 12 countries over the...

In this paper we present an innovative and straightforward model for constructing consistent and accurate implied volatility surfaces. The parameters of this model are directly linked to measurable and observable market risks

The unparalleled surge of the crude oil price after 2003 has triggered a heated scientific and public debate about its ultimate causes. Unexpected demand growth particularly from emerging economies appears to be the most prominently supported reason among academics. We study the price dynamics...

Recent empirical studies suggest that the negative effects of uncertainty shocks are stronger in recessions than during booms. In this study, I provide a theoretical mechanism that can explain this empirical observation. I start from the argument that the effect of uncertainty on investment...