This paper investigates the design of a leniency policy to fight corporate crime. We explicitly take into account the agency problem within the firm. We model this through a three-tier hierarchy: authority, shareholder, and manager. The manager may breach the law and report evidence to the...

Price indices for heterogenous goods such as real estate or fine art constitute crucial information for institutional or private investors considering alternative investments in times of financial markets turmoil. Classical mean-variance analysis of alternative investments has been hampered by...

A central issue in climate policy is the question whether long-term targets for green- house gas emissions should be adopted. This paper analyzes strategic effects related to the timing of such commitments. Using a two-country model, we identify a redistributive effect that undermines long-term...

There is increasing demand for models of time-varying and non-Gaussian dependencies for mul- tivariate time-series. Available models suffer from the curse of dimensionality or restrictive assumptions on the parameters and the distribution. A promising class of models are the hierarchical...

A new test for constant correlation is proposed. Based on the bivariate Student-t distribution, this test is derived as Lagrange multiplier (LM) test. Whereas most of the traditional tests (e.g. Jennrich, 1970, Tang, 1995 and Goetzmann, Li & Rouwenhorst, 2005) specify the unknown correlations as...

Publications are a vital element of any scientist’s career. It is not only the number of media outlets but aslo the quality of published research that enters decisions on jobs, salary, tenure, etc. Academic ranking scales in economics and other disciplines are, therefore, widely used in...

We introduce a dynamic panel threshold model to shed new light on the impact of inflation on long-term economic growth. The empirical analysis is based on a large panel-data set including 124 countries during the period from 1950 to 2004. For industrialized countries, our results confirm the...

This paper presents the results of an empirical study concerning conventional and socially responsible mutual funds.We apply a sophisticated operations research algorithm embedded in inverse portfolio optimization on financial market data, ESG-scores and CRSP fund data. Due to our results we...