Our study aims to uncover the roots of financial literacy. Better financial literacy predicts more informed savings and borrowing decisions in our sample, covering the urban middle-class in an emerging economy. We then test education at school, family background, parental teaching, and childhood...

This research challenges the stylized fact of a gender gap in financial literacy, i.e. the finding that women lag behind men in this respect. Our data which samples middle-class people from Bangkok does not show a gender gap, neither in regards to financial literacy nor regarding various kinds...

The determinants of portfolio choice have been studied extensively in the field of household finance. In this paper we study the determinants of the decision to hold risky assets based on a novel dataset of German bank data. Our primary focus is the question whether East Germans di er in their...

Why do some economic systems depend on bank financing while others rely on capital markets and bond financing? We propose a political economy model in which elites favor a bank-based system, which increases their rents due to reduced competition. If suffrage is restricted to the elite, this will...

I incorporate imperfect capital markets in a standard neoclassical model of economic growth to analyze the long run effect of capital market globalization for develping countries. In autarky, domestic savings are invested and Solow-type growth emerges. In contrast, when a country that lags...

The ex ante theory of collateral states that better informed lenders, such as informal lenders, rely less on collateral. We test this by contrasting the use of collateral between formal and informal lenders in the same market. Indeed, formal lenders rely more often on collateral, controlling for...

Recent years have seen an unprecedented increase in the provision of R&D tax incentives. A growing empirical literature suggests that R&D tax incentives are instrumental in raising domestic R&D activity. In policy debates this fi nding is often interpreted to lend support to the notion that R&D...

In the United States structure and equipment capital are e ffectively taxed at different rates. Recently, President Obama joined the group of policy makers and economists who propose to eliminate these di erentials. This paper analyzes the consequences of such a reform using an incomplete...

This paper sets up an imperfect-competition model of a small open economy, and undertakes a welfare comparison of the Corporate Business Income Tax (CBIT) and the Allowance for Corporate Equity tax (ACE). A main result is that a small open economy should levy a positive source tax on capital in...

The objective of this paper is to look into the probability that, given the choice, corporate groups would opt for taxation on a consolidated basis. Consolidation would allow them to offset losses crossborder but remove the opportunity to exploit international tax-rate differentials between...