The paper studies the power of educational investments in relation to transfers for fostering lifetime income and for reducing income inequality in Germany. The welfare analysis is based on a model of age-dependent human capital accumulation, featuring dynamic complementarities in skill...

We review the empirical literature that studies the effect of ethnic diversity on the welfare state and on individual attitudes. The outcome variables that we cover in the survey are on the one hand public spending, and on the other hand individual attitudes and behaviour, including charity...

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...

Multimarket contact is perceived to be one of those factors, which can facilitate and sustain implicit collusive (cooperative) arrangements. This paper attempts to develop new approaches to study the interdependence of firm behaviour across markets, especially in the context of differentiated...

Owners of private companies often invest a substantial share of their net worth in one company, which exposes them to idiosyncratic risk. For US companies we investigate whether owners require compensation for lack of diversification in the form of higher returns to equity. Exposure to...

Do academic scientists bring valuable human capital to the companies they found or join? If so, what are the particular skills that compose their human capital and how are these skills related to firm performance? This paper examines these questions using a particular group of academic...

The increased diffusion of computers is one of the fundamental changes at workplaces in recent decades. While the majority of workers now spend a substantial fraction of their working day with a computer, research on the wage effect of computer use effectively came to a halt after DiNardo and...

Extending the controversial findings from relevant literature on testing the efficient market hypothesis for the U.S. housing market, the results from the monthly and quarterly transaction-based Case-Shiller indices from 1987 to 2009 provide further empirical evidence on the rejection of the...

This paper studies the aggregate substitution and expansion effects triggered by changes in input prices, in a context where firms supply a homogenous commodity and compete in quantities à la Cournot. We derive a sufficient condition for the existence of a Cournot equilibrium and show that this...

This paper presents and compares several time-series models for returns of broadbased stock indices. These models nest a nonlinear asymmetric GARCH (NGARCH) model as a special case. Some of these models are empirically motivated ad-hoc specifications others are derived from a representative...