Foreign-owned firms are frequently viewed as an important source of new capital, access to world markets and employment generation and there exist numerous studies on the determinants of FDI flows and the role of incentives designed to attract FDI. Similarly important for economic growth are...

In the discussion about the structure and evolution of financial systems, the US separated and the German universal banking system are commonly considered as antipodes. This paper shows that the differences in the role of banks in these two economies are less pronounced than the conventional...

This paper presents an online-experiment on overconfidence in the context of financial markets. Our subject pool consists of institutional investors, investment advisors and individual investors, all of them being registered users of a large online platform for market sentiment data. Due to...

A fall in house prices due to a change in its fundamental value redistributes wealth from those long housing (for whom the fundamental value of the house they own exceeds the present discounted value of their planned future consumption of housing services) to those short housing. In a closed...

The paper starts with a short survey on the main ideas of portfolio theory. Based on this, mean-variance efficient portfolios (stock as well as bond portfolios) for German investors of different degrees of risk aversion are constructed. It is shown that for them international diversification of...

The economics profession appears to have been unaware of the long build-up to the current worldwide financial crisis and to have significantly underestimated its dimensions once it started to unfold. In our view, this lack of understanding is due to a misallocation of research efforts in...

Bond as well as stock portfolios of German investors are compared to the respective mean-variance-efficient portfolios. It is found that independent of the investors' degree of risk aversion, German investors' portfolios deviate significantly from the mean-variance-efficient ones, especially the...

We empirically assess the determinants of India’s FDI outflows across a large sample of host countries in the 1996-2009 period. Based on gravity model specifications, we employ Poisson pseudo maximum likelihood (PPML) estimators. Major findings include: India’s outward FDI is hardly affected...

We construct comprehensive and comparable indices on the most relevant components of economic infrastructure. An unobserved components model is employed to cover the largest possible number of developing and developed countries over the period 1990-2010. We map major findings from the new...

We argue that the trend toward international investment agreements (IIAs) with stricter investment rules is driven by competitive diffusion, namely defensive moves of developing countries concerned about foreign direct investment (FDI) diversion in favor of competing host countries. Accounting...