In contrast to earlier field studies, we survey German public savings banks on their management of capital. We find that the most important determinants of the savings banks’ target capital ratio are risk aversion, the desired credit growth and profitability. Savings banks prefer to manage the...

This paper examines return predictability when the investor is uncertain about the right state variables. A novel feature of the model averaging approach used in this paper is to account for finite-sample bias of the coefficients in the predictive regressions. Drawing on an extensive...

We present evidence for a highly significant interaction between state dependence in individual unemployment risk and the business cycle. The disadvantage from having been unemployed in the previous period is smaller in times of relatively high unemployment and larger in times of low...

On the basis of a theoretical model, we argue that higher aggregate unemployment affects individual returns to education. We therefore include aggregate unemployment and an interaction term between unemployment and the individual education level in a standard Mincer equation. Our results show...

We study the performance of conditional asset pricing models in explaining the German cross-section of stock returns. Our test assets are portfolios sorted by size and book-to-market as in the paper by Fama and French (1993). Our results show that the empirical performance of the Capital Asset...

Theoretical considerations suggest that secrecy reduces spillovers almost completely through non-disclosure, while the disclosure requirement of patents generates some spillover and at the same time allows firms to appropriate knowledge. In this paper we empirically analyze whether protection by...