This paper analyses the impact of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) on global financial markets. It presents back-of-the-envelope calculations which simulate the potential impact of a transfer of traditional foreign exchange reserves to SWFs on global capital flows. If SWFs behave as CAPM-type...

By means of an event study of stock market reactions to the announcement of the Olympic Games host cities, we find a significant and positive announcement effect of hosting the Summer Games, with a cumulative abnormal return of about 2% within a few days. We do not find any significant results...

Recent research suggests that the power law is one of the most universal laws in nature and it also seems to work quite fine in economics and finance. In this paper we show that the power law explains extremely well the relationship between the value of broad-based market indices and their...

In a constantly changing economic environment a country's ability to undertake institutional reforms is crucial to maintain economic growth and to promote the welfare of its citizens. A wide range of determinants for institutional reforms have been identified. However, the impact of trust on...

Knowledge flows within and across countries should be carriers of important learning spillovers. We use data on 1.5 million patents and 4.5 million citations to analyze knowledge flows across 147 subnational regions. We estimate that only 15% of average knowledge is learned outside the average...

We decompose the economic implications of the Kyoto Protocol at the cross-country level, splitting the total economic impact for each region into contributions from its own emission abatement policy and those from other regions. Our analysis which is based on a large-scale computable general...

Cross-border investments represent a substantial share of venture capital activities. We use a new and comprehensive dataset on worldwide investments to analyze the internationalization of venture capital financing. Our results from the perspectives of (i) venture capitalists, (ii) portfolio...

The recent corporate failures in the US and in Europe have considerably damaged investors’ confidence in the functioning of financial markets and the ability of the regulatory framework to safeguard their interest and prevent fraud. These episodes demonstrate that market failures exist, which...