We consider a mean-variance general equilibrium economy where the expected returns for controlling and non-controlling shareholders are different because the former are able to divert a fraction of the profits. We find that when investor protection is poor, asset return correlation affects...

We empirically analyze the determinants of Initial Public Offering (IPO) underpricing using panel data for 29 countries over the period 1988-2005. Our hypotheses stress the importance of institutional and legal factors in explaining cross-country variations. We find that increased protection of...

Different investor classes are endowed with different rights, and conflicting interests among them can make protections afforded to one party detrimental to another. Indeed, we find that investor protection laws have sizeable 'cross' effects on foreign portfolio investment and the direction of...

Chinese currency policy has had a strong impact on the value of investors' portfolios in recent years. On August 11, 2015, the People's Bank of China announced a new exchange rate policy where the RMB central parity rate against the USD would be determined each morning by the previous day's...

European countries experienced a large increase in labor supply due to the influx of Ukrainian refugees after the 2022 Russia invasion. We study its dynamic effects in a spatial model with forward-looking households of different skills, trade, and endogenous capital accumulation. We find that...

Guilds are social scientists? favoured historical example of institutions generating a 'social capital? of trust that benefited entire economies. This article considers this view in the light of empirical findings for early modern Europe. It draws the distinction between a ?particularized? trust...

This paper uses a proportional hazard model to study foreign direct investment by Japanese manufacturers in Europe between 1970 and 1994. We divide each firm's investment total into a sequence of individual investment decisions and analyze how firm-specific characteristics affect each decision....

Institutions - the structures of rules and norms governing economic transactions - are widely assigned a central role in economic development. Yet economic history is still dominated by the belief that institutions arise and survive because they are economically efficient. This paper shows that...

Using data from the European Social Survey (ESS), we examine the link between income and subjective well-being. We find that, for the whole sample of nineteen European countries, although income is positively correlated with both happiness and life satisfaction, reference income exerts a...

The paper examines the timing of exit from the interwar gold-exchange standard for a panel of European countries, based on monthly data over the period January 1928 - December 1936. I show that exit from gold can be understood in terms of a trade-off between a limited set of factors commonly...