This paper uses a quasi-experimental framework provided by recent changes in Russian corporate law to study the effect of investor protection on the value of shares. The legal change analyzed involves the empowerment of preferred (non-voting) shareholders to veto unfavorable changes in their...

This paper is concerned with empirical and theoretical basis of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH). The paper begins with an overview of the statistical properties of asset returns at different frequencies (daily, weekly and monthly), and considers the evidence on return predictability, risk...

Anglo-Saxon countries have been successful in the 1990s concerning labor market performance compared to the former role models Germany and Japan. This reversal in relative economic performance might be related to idiosyncracies in financial markets with bank-based financial markets as in Germany...

In the book Myth and Measurement, Card and Krueger (1995) examine the economic impact of the 1989 minimum wage hike on the welfare of 110 firms which employ a disproportionate number of minimum-wage workers. Their results show mixed evidence that excess returns associated with news about the...

We present a theorem helpful in estimating the mean and variance of a linear function with arbitrary multivariate randomness in its coefficients and variables. We derive a generalized decomposition result from two random linear functions in which the result can be applied to most models using...

This paper uses a quasi-experimental framework provided by recent changes in Russian corporate law to study the effect of investor protection on the value of shares. The legal change analyzed involves the empowerment of preferred (non-voting) shareholders to veto unfavorable changes in their...

Starting a firm with expansive potential is an option for educated and high-skilled workers. This option serves as an insurance against unemployment caused by labor market frictions and hence increases the incentives for education. We show within a matching model that reducing the start-up costs...

In multiple-task hidden-action models, the (mis-)allocation of effort may play an important role for benefit creation. Signals which capture this benefit and which are used in incentive schemes should thus not only be judged by the noise and the associated costs but also by the mis-allocation...

When designing incentives for a manager, the trade-off between insurance and a good allocation of effort across various tasks is often identified with a trade-off between the responsiveness (sensitivity, precision, signal-noise ratio) of the performance measure and its similarity (congruity,...

Incentives often fail in inducing economic agents to engage in a desirable activity; implementability is restricted. What restricts implementability? When does re-organization help to overcome this restriction? This paper shows that any restriction of implementability is caused by an...