Building on a new model of institutions proposed by Aoki and the systemic approach to economic civilizations outlined by Kuran, this paper attempts an analysis of the cultural foundations of recent Chinese economic development. I argue that the cultural impact needs to be conceived as a creative...

This paper examines the treatment of sovereign debt exposure within the Basel framework and measures the impact of bank regulation on the demand of Monetary Financial Institutions (MFI) for marketable sovereign debt. Our results suggest that bank regulation has a significant positive impact on...

[Introduction ...] The rest of this paper is set up as follows. In section 2 we provide a brief description of the ECB's comprehensive assessment of the European banking system. In section 3 we describe the data we are using and provide some descriptive statistics, particularly regarding the...

Trading and investment strategies play an essential part in better understanding fixed income markets. Over-the-counter markets and thousands of different outstanding bonds increase the difficulties to identify adequate comparison methods. Market participants and their practices differ widely...

China's rapid economic growth in recent decades has not led to balanced income distribution: inter- and intra-provincial income inequality have been increasing and their respective contribution to the total income inequality remains relatively stable. Based on a new set of prefectural database...

We test how bank market power influences technical change and resource allocation of informationally opaque firms. We use a dataset with approximately 700,000 firm-year observations of German small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) to identify the effect of bank market power using the...

In his Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen compares the two basic approaches to evaluate institutions, transcendental institutionalism and realization-focused comparisons. Referring to Smith's Impartial Spectator, he argues in favour of the latter and proposes the principle of Open Impartiality....

After the onset of the subprime crisis and the European debt crisis, credit default swaps (CDS) have seen a strong increase in usage. Particularly sovereign CDS protection has been sought after, paralleling the rise in sovereign debt levels, slumps in GDP growth and political tensions in...

Innovation processes within corporations increasingly tap into international technology sources, yet little is known about the relative contribution of different types of innovation channels. We investigate the effectiveness of different types of international technology sourcing activities...

Is the OMT program in violation of the ECB's mandate? This paper applies the economic argumentation put forth by the OMT's opponents and supporters before the Federal German Constitutional Court [Bundesverfassungsgericht] to the full allotment policy practiced by the ECB since October 2008. The...