Although blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies have grown in popularity over the past years, there does not seem to be a consensus if they bring any value to economic interactions. In this paper, I argue that a fundamental value the blockchain provides is commitment. I develop a model of an...

Promotions serve two purposes. They ought to provide incentives for employees and to select the best employee for a management position. However, if non-contractible managerial decision rights give rise to private benefits and preference misalignment between managers and the firm, these two...

This policy paper studies the effects of a sudden stop of natural gas imports from Russia on the German economy. The analysis focuses on the supply-side effects that arise when a gas shortage affects production in the gas-intensive manufacturing sectors, with a corresponding production...

Any serious empirical study of factor substitutability has to allow the data to display complementarity as well as substitutability. The standard approach reflecting this idea is a translog specification - this is also the approach used by numerous studies analyzing the relative capital-skill...

Using a new administrative dataset, we provide fresh micro-level evidence on firms’ returns to scale (RTS). We employ a new administrative database, iBACH, which contains extensive high-quality annual balance sheet, financial, and demographic information on more than two million non-financial...

This policy report studies the effects of a sudden stop of natural gas imports from Russia on the German economy. The analysis focuses on the supply-side effects that arise when a gas shortage affects production in the gas-intensive manufacturing sectors, with a corresponding production...

This paper studies the market microstructure of pre-industrial Europe. In particular we investigate the institution of the broker in markets and fairs, and develop a unique data set of approximately 1100 sets of brokerage rules in 42 merchant towns in Central and Western Europe from the late...

Repo markets offering central counterparty (CCP) clearing and anonymized trading were remarkably resilient during the recent crises. We use the full transaction level dataset on all repo trades on Eurex Repo, including identifiers for market participants, to provide a detailed description of the...