Using the contingent claim approach and market data on sovereign credit default swaps we assess the drivers of a country s risk perception. Deriving market-based asset values for a set of advanced economies we gain insights into the capital markets perspectives on sovereign creditworthiness. We...

We consider fundamental questions of arbitrage pricing arising when the uncertainty model incorporates volatility uncertainty. With a standard probabilistic model, essential equivalence between the absence of arbitrage and the existence of an equivalent martingale measure is a folk theorem, see...

In this paper, we show that large inflows into commodity investments, a recent phenomenon known as financialization, has changed the behavior and dependence structure between commodities and the general stock market. The common perception is that the increase in comovements is the result of...

We provide an overidentification test for a nonparametric treatment model where individuals are allowed to select into treatment based on unobserved gains. Our test can be used to test the validity of instruments in a framework with essential heterogeneity (Imbens and Angrist 1994). The...

Empirical studies analyzing the determinants of U.S. presidential popularity have delivered quite inconclusive results concerning the role of economic variables by assuming linear relationships. We employ penalized spline smoothing in the context of semi-parametric additive mixed models and...

Based on the seminal paper of Farrell (1957), researchers have developed several methods for measuring e fficiency. Nowadays, the most prominent representatives are nonparametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) and parametric stochastic frontier analysis (SFA), both introduced in the late 1970s....

We analyse the impact of retraining for the unemployed on future labour market success, and estimate effects separately for different target occupations. We use German registry data and apply statistical matching methods. The results show that on average, after a period with strong lock-in...

This paper aims at formulating econometric tools for investigating stochastic rationality, using the Random Utility Models (RUM) to deal with unobserved heterogeneity nonparametrically. Theoretical implications of the RUM have been studied in the literature, and in particular this paper utilizes...

We propose a new monetary policy surprise measure based on cojumps in tick-data of a short and long term interest rate. We extend a recently proposed test for cojumps to distinguish policy announcements that shift the short and long end of the yield curve in the same direction (level shift) and...

We propose a novel semiparametric method to extract location values from house prices. After splitting house prices into building and land components, location values are estimated with adaptive weight smoothing. The adaptive estimator requires neither strong smoothness assumptions nor local...