We argue that risk sharing motivates the bank-wide structure of bonus pay. In the presence of financial frictions that make external financing costly, the optimal contract between shareholders and employees involves some degree of risk sharing whereby bonus pay partially absorbs earnings shocks....

The recent negative interest rate policy (NIRP) and quantitative easing (QE) programme by the ECB have raised concerns about the pass-through of monetary policy. On the one hand, negative rates could lead to declining bank profitability making an expansionary monetary policy contractionary....

This paper studies empirically the relationship between competition and risk taking in banking markets. We exploit an unique dataset providing information about all bank loans to Norwegian firms over several years. Rather than relying on observed market shares, we use the distance between bank...

This paper studies the role of beliefs about own performance or appearance for compliance at the customs. In an experiment in which underreporting has a higher expected payoff than truthful reporting we find: a large share, about 15-20 percent of the subjects, is more compliant if they have...

This paper presents a new methodology to detect corruption in customs and applies it to Madagascar’s main port. Manipulation of assignment of import declarations to inspectors is identified by measuring deviations from random assignment prescribed by official rules. Deviant declarations are...

Inventory fluctuations are an important phenomenon in business cycles. However, the preliminary data on inventory investment as published in the German national accounts are tremendously prone to revision and therefore ill-equipped to diagnose the current stance of the inventory cycle. The Ifo...

The objective of this paper is to address the question of convergence across German districts in the first decade after German unification by drawing out and emphasising some stylised facts of regional per capita income dynamics. We achieve this by employing non-parametric techniques which focus...