Recent literature on international trade has established that the most productive firms become multinationals. But our data reveal a startling variation in productivity levels of foreign affiliates across the countries in Eastern Europe of the same European multinational parent firms suggesting...

Microfinance is typically associated with joint liability of group members. However, a large part of microfinance institutions rather offers individual instead of group loans. We analyze the incentive mechanisms in both individual and group contracts. Moreover, we show that microfinance...

Foreign bank entry is frequently associated with spillover effects for local banks and increasing competition in the local banking market. We study the impact of these effects on host countries. In particular, we ask how these effects interact and how they depend on the competitive environment...

When expanding abroad, a multinational bank faces a trade-off between accessing a foreign country via cross border lending or a financial foreign direct investment, i.e. greenfield or acquisition entry. We analyze the entry mode choice of multinational banks and explicitly derive the entry mode...

We study the apparent disconnect between what countries announce to be their exchange rate regime and what they de facto implement. Even though discrepancies between announcements and de facto polices are frequent, there is a lack of understanding of actual patterns and underlying reasons. We...

In the course of the EU enlargement process, the participation of accession countries in the European Monetary Union might lead to a significant redistribution of seigniorage wealth if current regulations prevail. In general, accession countries will be winners from this redistribution, for...

Relational contracts have been shown to mitigate moral hazard in labor and credit markets. A central assumption in most theoretical and experimental studies is that, upon misbehaving, agents can be excluded from their current source of income and have to resort to less attractive outside...