Leaders are critical to a country's success. They can influence domestic policy via specific measures that they enforce, and they can also influence international public opinion towards their country. Foreign Direct Investments are also essential for a country's economic growth. Our hypothesis...

Motivated by the investor sentiment literature and assuming that terrorist activity influences investor mood the paper explores whether terrorism exerts a significant negative impact on daily stock market returns for a sample of 22 countries. The employed empirical specifications are based on...

We propose a framework for comparing the relationship between poverty and personal characteristics across countries (or across years), and use it to compare levels and patterns of relative poverty in the USA, Great Britain and Germany during the 1990s. The higher aggregate poverty rates in the...

In this paper, we construct the country-specific chronologies of the house price bubbles for 12 OECD countries over the period 1969:Q1- 2010:Q2. These chronologies are obtained using a combination of a fundamental and a filter approaches. The resulting speculative bubble chronology is the one...

Using high-frequency transaction data for the three largest European markets (France, Germany and Italy), this paper documents the existence of an asymmetric relationship between market liquidity and trading imbalances: when quoted spreads rise (fall) and liquidity falls (increases) buy (sell)...

In the year 2000, the German government passed the most ambitious tax reform in post-war German history aiming at a significant tax relief for households. One central aim of this tax reform was to improve work incentives and, thereby, foster employment. In this paper, I estimate an intertemporal...

In this paper R2-type measures of the explanatory power of multivariate linear and categorical probit models proposed in the literature are reviewed and their deficiencies are discussed. It is argued that a measure of the explanatory power should take into account the components which are...

In this paper we investigate the effects of EU enlargement on price convergence. The internal market is expected to boost integration and increase efficiency and welfare through a convergence of prices in product markets. Two principal drivers are crucial to explain price developments. On the...