The paper empirically studies whether pharmaceutical firms uses advertising as a signal for high quality drugs. A nested random effects count data hurdle model is introduced to handle the excess number of zero observations in the sample as well as nested random drug, firm and substance specific...

Novel empirical evidence indicates the importance of gender identity and gender norms on individuals’ financial risk-taking. Specifically, by use of matching and by dividing male and females into those with “traditional” versus “nontraditional” gender identities, comparison of average...

This paper studies the risk-return profile of centralized and decentralized banks. We address the conditions that favor a particular lending regime while acknowledging the effects on lending and returns caused by the course of the business cycle. To analyze these issues, we develop a model which...

In this paper new and detailed empirical evidence on the impact of family on individuals’ stock market participation decision is provided. Since influence is likely to vary systematically over different types of individuals the heterogeneous effect of social interaction, in a setting including...

Stock market participation is found to be positively related to cognitive, as well as non-cognitive ability, controlling for wealth, income, age, and other demographic and socioeconomic factors. Interestingly, the effects are of economic significant magnitudes, e.g. participation is on average...

It is something of a puzzle that politicians around the world have chosen to give up power to independent central banks, thereby reducing their possibilities to fine-tune the economy. In this paper the determinants of central bank independence (CBI) reforms are studied using a new data set on...

This paper empirically tests whether an open limit order book contains information about future short-run stock price movements. To account for the discrete nature of price changes, the integer-valued autoregressive model of order one is utilized. A model transformation has an advantage over...

Generalized method of moments estimation and forecasting is introduced for very small samples when additional non-sample information is available. Small simulation experiments are conducted for the linear model with errors-in-variables and for a Poisson regression model. Two empirical...