In this paper we give an overview, with special emphasis on Germany, of the recent development of the market for venture capital. We analyse the financial contracting problems that arise when entrepreneurs need capital from outside investors, and demonstrate how these problems are addressed by...

We provide evidence on the fit of the hybrid New Keynesian Phillips curve for selected Euro zone countries, the US and the UK. Instead of imposing rational expectations and estimating the Phillips curve by the Generalized Method of Moments, we use direct measures of inflation expectations from...

This paper evaluates the performance of simple policy rules in an open economy. By introducing a high degree of exchange rate uncertainty we find that policy rules with an important feedback from movements in the real exchange rate are very robust to uncertainty about the true exchange rate...

For the open economy, the workhorse model in intermediate textbooksstill is the Mundell-Fleming model, which basically extends theinvestment and savings, liquidity preference and money supply (IS-LM)model to open economy problems. The authors present a simple NewKeynesian model of the open...

This paper uses panel vector autoregressive models and simulations of an estimated DSGE model to explore the reaction of Euro area banks to the global financial crisis. We focus on their interest rate setting behavior in response to standard macroeconomic shocks. Our main empirical finding is...

High-performance work systems give workers more discretion, thereby increasing effort productivity but also shirking opportunities. We show experimentally that screening for work attitude and labor market competition are causal determinants of the viability of high-performance work systems, and...

Contingent ownership structures are prevalent in joint ventures. We offer an explanation based on the investment incentives provided by such an arrangement. We consider a holdup problem in which two parties make relationship-specific investments sequentially to generate a joint surplus in the...

The actual mainstream view of academics emphasizes the so-called \"two-corner solution\" with either completely fixed or independently floating exchange rates. We will argue in this paper that the requirements for fixed rates are rather too restrictive to be successful. On the other hand, the...

We propose a theory of ex post inefficient renegotiation that is based on loss aversion. When two parties write a long-term contract that has to be renegotiated after the realization of the state of the world, they take the initial contract as a reference point to which they compare gains and...