Öffentliche Meinung als Online-Diskurs – ein neuer empirischer Zugang

The paper introduces a new empirical approach for measuring public opinion in the Internet: In a first step, all web pages containing relevant messages dealing with a specific issue are retrieved with a search engine. The pages are then content-analyzed in a second step. To answer the theoretical question of which kind of public opinion is registered by applying this method, the two basic paradigms of public opinion, which have hardly ever been connected so far, are discussed: public opinion as discourse and public opinion as measured by surveys. For the first time, both paradigms can be empirically compared by using a survey on the one hand, and the search engine based content analysis of web pages on the other. We conducted such a comparison for the issue of a smoking ban in restaurants, which was heavily discussed in Germany in 2007. The results reveal some fascinating parallels between both data sets and some differences, which are quite well in line with the theoretical assumptions. The paper finishes with some considerations on the theoretical and empirical capabilities of the approach.     

Forecasting the business cycle using survey data

Regular business survey data are published as percentages of firms predicting higher, equal or lower values of some reference variable. Time series of such percentages do not fit production data too well. Univariate models often produce forecasts which are just as accurarate. Still, surveys contain anticipative judgement which, when combined with univariate modeling and proper filtering, may produce a good indicator for business cycle turning points. The way survey data are transformed so as to fit statistics on production seems not to be of much importance. A case study of the Finnish forest industry is offered as an example.     

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.     

Die Stadtstaatenwertung—ein Hindernis für Länderfusionen?

Die Bestrebungen für eine Fusion von Berlin und Brandenburg haben gezeigt, dass L?nderfusionen politisch nur umsetzbar sind, wenn Klarheit über die Finanzperspektiven der beteiligten L?nder besteht. Dabei kommt den rechtlichen Folgen eines Zusammenschlusses für die so genannte Stadtstaatenwertung im L?nderfinanzausgleich zentrale Bedeutung zu. Bislang wurde stets davon ausgegangen, dass L?nderfusionen den Wegfall der Stadtstaatenwertung und damit Kompensationsregelungen erfordern. Verlangt das geltende Recht auf der Grundlage der Finanzverfassung tats?chlich den Wegfall der Stadtstaatenwertung? Der Aufsatz gibt die pers?nliche Meinung der Verfasser wieder.     

Cross hedging under multiplicative basis risk

Cross hedging price risk in an incomplete financial market creates basis risk. We propose a new way of modeling basis risk where price risk and basis risk are combined in a multiplicative way. Under this specification, positive prudence is a necessary and sufficient condition for underhedging in an unbiased market. Using the example of cross hedging jet fuel price risk with crude oil futures, we show that the new specification is superior in describing the price series and that optimal cross hedges differ significantly from those derived under the traditional additive cross hedging model.