How do individual investors trade?

This paper examines how high-frequency trading decisions of individual investors are influenced by past price changes. Specifically, we address the question as to whether decisions to open or close a position are different when investors already hold a position compared with when they do not. Based on a unique data set from an electronic foreign exchange trading platform, OANDA FXTrade, we find that investors’ future order flow is (significantly) driven by past price movements and that these predictive patterns last up to several hours. This observation clearly shows that for high-frequency trading, investors rely on previous price movements in making future investment decisions. We provide clear evidence that market and limit orders flows are much more predictable if those orders are submitted to close an existing position than if they are used to open one. We interpret this finding as evidence for the existence of a monitoring effect, which has implications for theoretical market microstructure models and behavioral finance phenomena, such as the endowment effect.     

The dynamics of environmentalism and the environment

We study the relationship between environmental preferences and the environment. Preferences are transmitted intergenerationally and through social interactions, where we assume that agents are more likely to adopt environmental preferences the larger the amount of pollution. In the basic setting we find that both converge non-monotonically towards an interior steady state. When including technical change we notice that there will be no change in the steady state level of the environment unless technical change is sufficiently strong, which stands in stark contrast to the literature. Upon introducing environmental laws we find that these may lead to a virtually pollution-free environment. This happens if environmental laws are implemented when public support is strong enough.     

Home-Market and Factor-Endowment Effects in a Gravity Approach

This paper shows how the home-market effect can be estimated in the generalized gravity equation of Bergstrand, taking into account traditional comparative advantage effects arising from differences in factor endowment. The empirical results suggest the presence of significant home-market effects for differentiated goods in many manufacturing industries which may be capital intensive or labour intensive. At the same time, our results suggest that home-market effects can only be detected for data disaggregated at the industry level and not for aggregated data. JEL no. F 12     

Transferring HR practices within multinational corporations

There is extensive evidence that planned transfers of management practices by the headquarters of multinational corporations (MNCs) to foreign subsidiaries are not always successful. In this article, we outline a model of factors influencing the transfer of HR practices to MNC units abroad. The article has two main contributions. First, we develop a more holistic understanding of the outcome of HR practice transfer as encompassing three dimensions: implementation, internalisation and integration. Second, we expand current explanations of transfers of practices to foreign units. We argue that transfer of HR practices is a social process where the governance mechanisms used by the MNC, characteristics of the subsidiary HR systems, the social relationship between the subsidiary and MNC headquarters, and the transfer approach taken by headquarters management will influence the outcome of the process.     

A Survey of Ethics Officers in Large Organizations

Corporations in the United States have been starting ethics programs for a variety of reasons both active and passive. Ethics officers are being charged with improving both company image and the level of ethical decision-making by employees. Thirty ethics officers from Fortune 500 firms were surveyed to develop a database of their duties and the companies' commitment to ethical standards. The results suggest much is being done, both in the diversity of responses and the similarities of commitment and duties.     

Rückkaufswert von Lebensversicherungen und Europarecht

This article deals with the calculation of surrender values of life assurances according to §169 Abs. 3 VVG and its conformity with European Law. The main focus is on the influence of this regulation on designing and offering assurance products by insurers of other Member States of the European Union under the right of establishment and the freedom to provide services. The problems with guaranteed surrender values and distribution of acquisition costs have, therefore, to be examined. Finally, the European principle that consumer information prevails over regulation of product design has to be discussed against the background of the European internal market.     

Chemotherapie: Nebenwirkungen lindern

Supportiv behandeln – Eine Chemotherapie ist ein sehr einschneidendes Erlebnis für die Patientin – gepr?gt von Vorurteilen und ?ngsten in Bezug auf die Nebenwirkungen. Jede beteiligte Pflegekraft sollte die Patientin daher fachgerecht beraten und begleiten k?nnen.     

A Generalized Moments Estimator for the Autoregressive Parameter in a Spatial Model

This paper is concerned with the estimation of the autoregressive parameter in a widely considered spatial autocorrelation model. The typical estimator for this parameter considered in the literature is the (quasi) maximum likelihood estimator corresponding to a normal density. However, as discussed in this paper, the (quasi) maximum likelihood estimator may not be computationally feasible in many cases involving moderate- or large-sized samples. In this paper we suggest a generalized moments estimator that is computationally simple irrespective of the sample size. We provide results concerning the large and small sample properties of this estimator.     

POOLING VERSUS MODEL SELECTION FOR NOWCASTING GDP WITH MANY PREDICTORS: EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FOR SIX INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRIES

This paper discusses pooling versus model selection for nowcasting with large datasets in the presence of model uncertainty. In practice, nowcasting a low‐frequency variable with a large number of high‐frequency indicators should account for at least two data irregularities: (i) unbalanced data with missing observations at the end of the sample due to publication delays; and (ii) different sampling frequencies of the data. Two model classes suited in this context are factor models based on large datasets and mixed‐data sampling (MIDAS) regressions with few predictors. The specification of these models requires several choices related to, amongst other things, the factor estimation method and the number of factors, lag length and indicator selection. Thus there are many sources of misspecification when selecting a particular model, and an alternative would be pooling over a large set of different model specifications. We evaluate the relative performance of pooling and model selection for nowcasting quarterly GDP for six large industrialized countries. We find that the nowcast performance of single models varies considerably over time, in line with the forecasting literature. Model selection based on sequential application of information criteria can outperform benchmarks. However, the results highly depend on the selection method chosen. In contrast, pooling of nowcast models provides an overall very stable nowcast performance over time. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Modelling financial transaction price movements: a dynamic integer count data model

In this paper we develop a dynamic model for integer counts to capture fundamental properties of financial prices at the transaction level. Our model relies on an autoregressive multinomial component for the direction of the price change and a dynamic count data component for the size of the price changes. Since the model is capable of capturing a wide range of discrete price movements it is particularly suited for financial markets where the trading intensity is moderate or low. We present the model at work by applying it to transaction data of two shares traded at the NYSE traded over a period of one trading month. We show that the model is well suited to test some theoretical implications of the market microstructure theory on the relationship between price movements and other marks of the trading process. Based on density forecast methods modified for the case of discrete random variables we show that our model is capable to explain large parts of the observed distribution of price changes at the transaction level.