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...

Sentiment indices based on investor sentiment surveys attempt to measure the stock market sentiment. The literature on these indices focusses mainly on whether investor sentiment influences the financial markets or not. But the term 'sentiment' has never been defined in the literature. Therefore...

In order to understand from where the profits or monetary profits of capitalists and firms emerge the author examined the phrase of Marx, 'Die Gesamtklasse der Kapitalisten kann nichts aus der Zirkulation herausziehen, was nicht vorher hineingeworfen war.' (The class of capitalists cannot...

This paper offers a quantitative description of European private equity markets and compares the recent development in these markets with the development of the US venture capital market. Moreover, the paper addresses the differences between private equity investors acting in a single national...

The stock of public debt in some developed countries continues to increase because of a lack of tax revenues and the burdens of social security. Many of those developed countries suffer from lower birth rates. Child allowances might help to raise fertility, leading to higher tax revenue in the...

There are only few estimates of the returns on contributions to the German public pension System (GPPS). Those that are published ränge between nominal rates of future returns between about 4,5 % and 48 %, indicating that GPPS treats different groups of people differently. The authors develop a...

The aim of this study is to analyze investor response to different measures of pension plan performance. To do this, we implement a fixed effects panel data methodology corrected by heteroskedasticity, serial correlation and cross-sectional dependence, as proposed by Vogelsang...

Apart from altruistic reasons, NGOs may engage in developing countries under conditions of conflict and war in order to secure funding and survive in the ‘market’ of humanitarian relief and development assistance. Applying a difference-in-difference-in-differences approach, we analyze...

In this paper, we analyze the network properties of the Italian e-MID data based on overnight loans during the period 1999-2010. We show that the networks appear to be random at the daily level, but contain significant non-random structure for longer aggregation periods. In this sense, the daily...

This paper analyzes insurance demand under prospect theory in a simple model with two states of the world and fair insurance contracts. We argue that two different reference points are reasonable in this framework, state-dependent initial wealth or final wealth after buying full insurance....