Statistical study of foreign exchange rates, empirical evidence of a price change scaling law, and intraday analysis

In this paper we present a statistical analysis of four foreign exchange spot rates against the U.S. Dollar with several million intra-day prices over 3 years. The analysis also includes gold prices and samples of daily foreign exchange prices over 15 years. The mean absolute changes of logarithmic prices are found to follow a scaling law against the time interval on which they are measured. This empirical law holds although the distributions of the price changes strongly differ for different interval sizes.Systematic variations of the volatility are found even during business hours by an intra-day analysis of price changes. Seasonal heteroskedasticity is observed with a period of one day as well as one week as the result of an analogous intra-week analysis; taking this into account is necessary for any future study of intra-day price change distributions and their generating process. The same type of analysis is also made for the bid-ask spreads.     

R&D spillovers and strategic delegation in oligopolistic contests

Considering oligopolistic contests with R&D spillovers and strategic delegation three results can be obtained: (1) There exist multiple asymmetric equilibria where one owner highly favors sales as a basis for his manager's incentives which drives the other firm out of the market. (2) If R&D spillovers are zero, a managerial firm will have a strong strategic advantage when competing with an entrepreneurial firm. If both owners endogenously decide about delegation, each owner's dominant strategy will be to delegate, given that the manager's reservation value is not too large. (3) If R&D spillovers are maximal, collusive market outcomes become very likely, which makes strategic delegation less important. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Business cycle measurement with some theory

A method to evaluate cyclical models not requiring knowledge of the DGP and the exact specification of the aggregate decision rules is proposed. We derive robust restrictions in a class of models; use some to identify structural shocks in the data and others to evaluate the class or contrast sub-models. The approach has good properties, even in small samples, and when the class of models is misspecified. The method is used to sort out the relevance of a certain friction (the presence of rule-of-thumb consumers) in a standard class of models.     

Regulierung, Effizienz und das Anreizdilemma bei Investitionen in intelligente Netze

In this paper, we survey from a theoretical point of view to what extend cost-based and incentive-based regulatory regimes stimulate investments. For the purpose of this analysis, we furthermore differentiate by different efficiency measures, i.e. allocative efficiency, productive efficiency and dynamic efficiency and analyse to what extend each efficiency measure is stimulated by the regulatory regime. Eventually, we analyse to what extend regulatory incentives for network innovation in a smart grid context exist and to what extend different forms of regulation stimulate dynamic efficiency.     

Union recognition in Britain's offshore oil and gas industry: implications of the Employment Relations Act 1999

The Employment Relations Act 1999 (ERA) has provided trade unions in the UK with new opportunities for achieving recognition. After a long history of anti‐unionism in the offshore oil and gas industry, employers have voluntarily ceded recognition to Trades Union Congress (TUC)‐affiliated trade unions. The legitimacy of this recognition process has been contested by the non‐TUC Offshore Industry Liaison Committee (OILC), an offshore workers’ union, seeking to act as a recognised bargaining agent. The ERA may be promoting ‘business friendly’ agreements at the expense of claims to recognition of other bargaining agents and of democratic employee choice.     

The Baltics: Continuing Boom or Bursting Bubble?

Since the late 1990s, the economies of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have experienced unprecedented economic growth, which has attracted a large number of foreign investors. American companies were among the first to seek business opportunities and have invested over $1 billion in the three countries as of 2008. However, the boom—partly financed on a loose credit policy—has recently created a fragile economic situation due to soaring wages, double-digit inflation, and high current account deficits. The resulting economic deceleration in the first half of 2008 has led analysts to comment that the “Baltic Bubble” is about to burst, potentially leading to a long-term recession. Other experts, nevertheless, maintain that the three countries are only experiencing a natural consolidation, which does not seriously endanger business opportunities in the long run. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the current condition of the Baltic economies and the environment for businesses there in order to determine if the three countries will still be attractive destinations for foreign direct investment (FDI) in the future.