Does globalization restrict the leeway for national budgetary policy? With the help of cluster and discriminant analysis this study provides evidence on the basis of the experience of OECD countries since the 1970s. Four budgetary dimensions are included in the analysis: tax structure,...

This paper incorporates the cost of adjustment between observed and optimal leverage in explaining the variation in firm?s equity or bank-debt financing investments. Using a dynamic adjustment approach identifies the determinants to capital structure between different financial systems. In...

We document using the ZEW panel of German stock market forecasters that weak forecasters tend to be overconfident in the sense that they provide extreme forecasts and their confidence intervals are less likely to contain eventual realizations. Moderate filters based on forecast accuracy over...

This paper empirically examines price formation in the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS). Our analysis shows that unexpected allocations of European Union Allowances (EUAs) lead to pronounced price reactions of the expected signs. Moreover, we find evidence that the adjustment of...

A sizeable literature reports that financial market analysts and forecasters herd for reputational reasons. Using new data from a large survey of professional forecasters' expectations about stock market movements, we find strong evidence that the expected average of all forecasters' forecasts...

Understanding the way in which knowledge is technically produced and transferred, and how its diffusion path can be characterized is of fundamental importance for the performance of an economy. Although this fact seems to be plausible ex ante, the relevant literature so far has paid less...

Unification fundamentally changed the terms of quantitative macroeconomic analysis for Germany. Two main areas concerned are data availability for the eastern part of Germany and structural changes within the behavioural equations after unification. Our paper presents results from the estimation...

This paper investigates whether failure in innovation at the firm level can account for cross-country heterogeneity in manufacturing productivity growth. There is no strong evidence in the literature on the existence of such link. Our work, however, differs in a number of ways from much of the...

Die Zusammenführung von Forschungs- und Entwicklungsbereichen als Folge einer Fusion oder Akquisition erfordert in der Regel ein umfassendes Integrationsprojekt, um die Innovationsfähigkeit des Unternehmens auch in Zukunft sicherzustellen. Auf Basis eines konzeptionellen Bezugsrahmens erfolgt...

We propose four different GMM estimators that allow almost consistent estimation of the structural parameters of panel probit models with fixed effects for the case of small T and large N. The moments used are derived for each period from a first order approximation of the mean of the dependent...