This paper investigates the short-term effects of public smoking bans on individual smoking behavior. In 2007 and 2008, state-level smoking bans were gradually introduced in all of Germany's sixteen federal states. We exploit this variation in the timing of state bans to identify the effect that...

Structural identification schemes are of essential importance to vector autoregressive (VAR) analysis. This paper tests a commonly used structural parameter identification scheme to assess whether it can properly capture fundamental and non-fundamental shocks to stock prices. In particular, five...

The creation of the EU's Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS) has turned the right to emit CO2 into a positively priced intermediate good for the affected firms. Firms thus face the decision whether to source compliance with the EU ETS within their boundaries or to acquire it through the permit...

This paper empirically investigates the relevance of liquidity constraints and excess sensitivity in intertemporal household consumption. Using a pseudo panel that has been constructed on rich German consumption survey data, we estimate the consumption responses to permanent and transitory...

That partisanship is bounded. Almost every West German, East German and immigrant never supports one or both of the major parties and most people vary support for their party by claiming no partisan preference. Hardly anyone ever selects each of the parties at different points in time. Immediate...

This paper investigates whether there are bubbles in stock prices. We do this using a previously studied structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model claiming to distinguish fundamental and non-fundamental shocks to real stock prices. TheSVAR model relies on an identification restriction in...

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)...

For many analysts, the Chinese economy is spurred by a bubble in the housing market, probably driven by the fiscal stimulus package and massive credit expansion, with pos-sible adverse effects to the real economy. To get insights into the size of the bubble, the house price evolution is...

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...