The research project investigates the role of expectations in financial decisions by asking two separate empirical questions. First, what systematic patterns appear in the expectations that the investor holds about relevant random variables? Second, can we establish that her expectations play a causal role for choices? The main tool in addressing these questions is the collection of data from...
This paper investigates the effect of ethnicity on time spent on secondary household production, work and leisure activities employing the 2000 UK Time Use Survey. We find that, unconditionally, white females manage to "stretch" their time the most by almost four additional hours per day and non-white men "stretch" their time the least. The three secondary activities most often combined with other ...
Many studies have focused on the influence of human capital and other 'objective' factors on career achievement. In our study, we go a step further by also looking at the impact of self-reported personality traits on differences in career chances. For the first time - to our knowledge - we compare managers and other white-collar employees in Germany's private sector and find evidence that personality ...
This paper examines the importance of different economic sentiments for the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) during the transition process. We first analyze the importance of economic confidence with respect to the CEECs' financial markets. Since the integration of formerly strongly-regulated markets into global markets can also lead to an increase in the dependence of the CEECs' economies ...
This paper estimates a trivariate VAR-GARCH(1,1)-in-mean model to examine linkages between the stock markets of three Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs), specifically the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, and both the UK and Russia. The adopted framework allows to analyze interdependence by estimating volatility spillovers, and also contagion by testing for possible shifts in the transmission ...
We model EU countries' bank ratings using financial variables and allowing for intercept and slope heterogeneity. Our aim is to assess whether "old" and "new" EU countries are rated differently and to determine whether "new" ones areassigned lower ratings, ceteris paribus, than "old" ones. We find that country-specific factors (in the form of heterogeneous intercepts) are a crucial determinant of ratings. ...
This paper documents the magnitude, pattern, and evolution of lifetime earnings inequality in Germany. Based on a large sample of earning biographies from social security records, we show that the intra-generational distribution of lifetime earnings of male workers has a Gini coefficient around .2 for cohorts born in the late 1930s and early 1940s; this amounts to about 2/3 of the value of the Gini ...
