Collaborative Research Center 823 - Statistical Modelling of Nonlinear Dynamic Processes

The DFG Colaborative Research Center 823 „Statistical Modelling of Nonlinear Dynamic Processes“, founded in 2009 and for which TU Dortmund University is the host university, received a further 8.5 million euros in funding in 2013 and was extended again in 2017. The funds allow the participating university professors from the TU departments of Statistics, Business and Economics, Mechanical Engineering, Physics, Architecture and Civil Engineering, and Mathematics to continue their research. This has led to many successful findings during the first funding period on a broad range of areas, such as the optimization of hearing aids, the analysis of financial market crises, and the optimal processing of concrete.

The Department of Business and Economics is central in covering the important economic apsects of the CRC 823. This is mostly done by the research and teaching areas of Economic Policy (Prof. Dr. Kraft), Applied Economics (Prof. Dr. Linnemann) and Macroeconomics (Prof. Dr. Jung)  in cooperation with the research area of Business and Social Statistics of the Department of Statistics of the TU and the Chair of Economic Policy and Applied Econometrics of the Ruhr-University Bochum.

The Collaborative Research Center 823 focuses on time-varying, dynamic processes in the research fields of economics and engineering. Statistical modeling in these areas is confronted with manifold, interdependent variables and complex processes with sometimes unclear dependencies. These cannot be described with conventional models. One example of this is the financial crisis: Here, almost all economic models failed in diagnosis and forecasting. Whereas in 2007, in calmer stock market times, the stock markets showed different developments and trends, in 2008 the crisis dragged almost all of them into the red - with almost equal losses in percentage terms. But why do international capital markets react similarly in economic downturns? And how can it be explained that the respective markets do not show the same behavior during upswings? The researchers of the CRC 823 are working on finding answers to these questions. In doing so, they try to find and quantify abrupt changes in complex processes, the so-called structural breaks.

The research results to date have been reflected in more than 250 scientific papers published in leading national and international journals.