ANFA – nationale Geldschöpfung als Sprengsatz für die Währungsunion?

The so called ANFA secret protocol brought to the public’s attention the previously only little noticed opportunity for national central banks of individual Eurozone members to create money through purchases of securities at their own expense. The ANFA financial assets amount to the significant share of 51% (gross) or rather 18% (net) of the Eurosystem’s balance sheet total and 41% of its total liquidity, thereby jeopardising the principle that the communities of the emitting and the money accepting countries should be congruent, which is seen as a stability condition for currency unions. There is a danger that the money creation via ANFA acts as an explosive device for the currency union. It is therefore necessary to clearly limit the own funds portfolio in order to restore the community of money emission.     

EU Agricultural Policy Reform: Evaluating the EU’s New Methodology for Direct Payments

The Common Agricultural Policy has changed significantly over time. Major changes are now introduced every seven years, with the last fundamental change agreed upon in 2013 for the period 2014-2020. Policymakers also agreed to a mid-term review in order to evaluate the performance of numerous new regulations. The Commission has elaborated a methodology for the evaluation and has already published some documents with initial results for past periods. This article reviews whether the methodology and database used by the Commission are in line with the highest standards for policy evaluation.     

Stochastic covariance and dimension reduction in the pricing of basket options

This paper presents a tailor-made method for dimension reduction aimed at approximating the price of basket options in the context of stochastic volatility and stochastic correlation. The methodology is built on a modification to the Principal Component Stochastic Volatility (PCSV) model, a stochastic covariance model that accounts for most stylized facts in prices. The method to reduce dimension is first derived theoretically. Afterwards the results are applied to a multivariate lognormal context as a special case of the PCSV model. Finally empirical results for the application of the method to the general PCSV model are illustrated.     

How safe are the safe haven assets?

The aim of this paper is to examine which of the assets commonly believed to be safe havens do, in fact, protect investors during periods of severe financial instability. Using a broad dataset of 32 assets over the period of 1964–2014, we examine the relationship of these assets with the US equity market during financial crises to determine which of them are safe havens for US investors, hedges, or speculations. We find that the US Treasuries and Japanese yen are the strongest safe haven investments in months characterized by large declines in market value or excessive volatility. We also document that the recent global financial crisis had significantly negative ramifications on the safe haven properties of many of these assets. Our out-of-sample analyses show that while, in general, predictive market exposures are negatively correlated with asset returns in strong market downturns, those of even the strongest safe haven assets are often statistically insignificant.     

Marktversagen auf dem geförderten Pflegezusatzversicherungsmarkt?

This study analyzes the supply side of the private German long term care insurance market. It compares loads and comprehensiveness of subsidized and unsubsidized insurance policies for three age groups. The results show that subsidized insurance policies are less comprehensive than unsubsidized insurance policies. In addition the premiums of subsidized policies are marked up substantially above expected benefits compared to unsubsidized policies. All in all these results indicate market failure due to adverse selection within the subsidized private long term care insurance market. Furthermore, the results show that due to unisex pricing, private long term care policies are in general more attractive to women than to men. As this is not reflected in demand, other factors than supply side failure seem to contribute to an overall low demand for private long term care insurance policies.     

Information diffusion and the predictability of New Zealand stock market returns

This paper examines the impact of international predictors from liquid markets on the predictability of excess returns in the New Zealand stock market using data from May 1992 to February 2011. We find that US stock market return and VIX contribute significantly to the out‐of‐sample forecasts at short horizons even after controlling for the effect of local predictors, while the contribution by Australian stock market return is not significant. We further demonstrate that the predictability of New Zealand stock market returns using US market predictors could be explained by the information diffusion between these two countries.     

WHAT'S TO KNOW ABOUT TIME USE?

Stimulated by the availability of large sets of microeconomic data, research on the economics of time use has been a growth industry in the past 20 years. That growth has included studies that have focused on the effect of people's value of time; on the mix of nonmarket activities that they undertake; on the interactions of spouses’ choices of time use; on the valuation of nonmarket time, and on the timing of nonmarket and market activities. By laying out these research questions and indicating their importance, this essay provides a framework for a series of meta‐analyses.