The determinants of portfolio choice have been studied extensively in the field of household finance. In this paper we study the determinants of the decision to hold risky assets based on a novel dataset of German bank data. Our primary focus is the question whether East Germans di er in their...

Im Zuge der deutschen Wiedervereinigung wurden die formalen Institutionen in West- und Ostdeutschland schnell angeglichen. Dies galt insbesondere auch für die Kapitelmärkte. Nach Einrichtung eines Wertpapierdepots konnten nun auch Ostdeutsche risikobehaftete Wertpapiere unterschiedlichster Art...

In this paper we study the effect of institutional reform on the decision to hold risky assets at the extensive and the intensive margin. We therefore make use of the natural experiment of German Division and Reunification and, based on savings bank customer data from German savings banks, study...

Das BUNDESMINISTERIUM FÜR VERKEHR UND DIGITALE INFRASTRUKTUR arbeitet derzeit an der Aufstellung eines neuen Bundesverkehrswegeplans, der bis zum Jahr 2015 vorgelegt werden soll. Eine wichtige Grundlage hierfür ist eine realistische Vorausschätzung der künftigen Verkehrsentwicklung in...

This paper builds a New Keynesian model with financial frictions and monetary and fiscal rules for the United States. We incorporate a rational bubble process in the (relative) price of capital. Our results show that bubbles account for a significant amount of variance in key macroeconomic...

The empirical evidence toward rational partisan theory of business cycles is mixed and thus inconclusive. This is due to the enormous heterogeneity of the existing empirical studies. Only a few of these test explicitly for the central theoretical innovation that post-electoral blips in economic...

The appellate review system is intended to serve as an efficient remedy for imperfect judicial decision making. However, it can fulfill this task only when appeals are filed solely due to bad verdicts and are ex-ante unpredictable based on factors that are exogenous to the judge. Using data from...

Because verdicts are typically the more costly resolution of legal disputes, most governments are interested in high settlement rates. In this paper, we use a unique dataset of 860 case records from a German trial court to explore which factors have a significant impact on the decision to settle...