Some path-breaking work on mergers takes efficiency gains for granted, or assumes that firms have perfect knowledge when taking merger decisions. In practice, firms and competition authorities cannot know exact future efficiency gains, prior to merger consummation. This paper analyzes horizontal...

This study identifies five distinctive stages of the current global financial crisis: the meltdown of the subprime mortgage market; spillovers into broader credit market; the liquidity crisis epitomized by the fallout of Northern Rock, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers with counterparty risk...

The paper analyzes the impact of information asymmetries between intermediaries and savers in open economies in a stochastic model that uses computer simulation. The model features two sectors producing two types of consumer goods and two sectors producing two typos of intermediate inputs (soft...

In providing precautionary incentives and allocating environmental risk, liability for environmental damages faces two difficulties: randomness of damages incurred and nonobservability of precautionary measures. Hence, a major obstacle in enforcing legal claims is the difficulty of proving...

Apart from scaling up foreign aid by NGOs, informed choices of private donors could also encourage an efficient and targeted use of NGO funds in international development cooperation. We assess the determinants of private donations across a large sample of US based NGOs with foreign aid...

In previous models of (cumulative) prospect theory reference-dependence of preferences is imposed beforehand and the location of the reference point is exogenously determined. This paper provides an axiomatization of a new specification of cumulative prospect theory, termed endogenous prospect...

Reichen die auf dem G-20-Gipfel beschlossenen Maßnahmen aus, die Finanzmärkte zu regulieren und die Wahrscheinlichkeit zukünftiger Krisen zu senken? Für Rolf J. Langhammer, Institut für Weltwirtschaft, Kiel, dienten die Beschlüsse des G-20-Gipfels der Krisenüberwindung und dem Versuch,...

Analyzing a large weekly retail transaction price dataset, we uncover a surprising regularity— small price increases occur more frequently than small price decreases for price changes of up to about 10 cents, while there is no such asymmetry for larger price changes. The asymmetry holds for...

This paper puts forward a novel approach to the analysis of direct contagion in financial networks. Financial systems are here represented as flow networks -i.e., directed and weighted graphs endowed with source nodes and sink nodes – and the propagation of losses and defaults, originated by...