Why are some countries so much richer than others? Development Accounting is a first-passattempt at organizing the answer around two proximate determinants: factors of productionand efficiency. It answers the question “how much of the cross-country income variance canbe attributed to...

We analytically and quantitatively examine a prominent justification forcapital income taxation: goods preferred by those with high ability ought tobe taxed. We study an environment where commodity taxes are allowed to benonlinear functions of income and consumption and find that, when ability...

We analytically and quantitatively examine a prominent justi…cation for capital income taxation: goodspreferred by those with high ability ought to be taxed. We study an environment where commodity taxesare allowed to be nonlinear functions of income and consumption and …nd that, when ability...

Small and informal firms account for a large share of employment in developing countries.The rapid expansion of microfinance services is based on the belief that these firms haveproductive investment opportunities and can enjoy high returns to capital if given theopportunity...

In an efficient economy, capital should be quickly (re)allocated from declining firms and sectors to more profitable investment opportunities. This process is affected by the concentration of corporate control, which in turn is affected by market institutions. We employ a panel of 12,000 firms...

In diesem Papier wird untersucht, welche Auswirkungen die Verfügbarkeit vonInfrastruktur auf die unternehmerische Investitionsentscheidung hat. Dabei ist unterstellt,dass Infrastruktur zum einen Input in der Produktionsfunktion ist und zumanderen die Höhe der Anpassungskosten beeinflusst. Als...

Banks all over the world are still concerned with the implementation of the new Basel Accord forCapital Adequacy which refines – among others – the minimum capital requirements. In the lastyears huge silo-like structures for data acquisition, data management, and data processing havebeen...

Fund-of-funds (FoF) managers face the task of selecting a (relatively) small number ofhedge funds from a large universe of candidate funds. We analyse whether such a selectioncan be successfully achieved by looking at the track records of the available funds alone,using advanced statistical...

[...]Our analysis suggests that, when we look across banks, themarket risk capital figures provide little additional informationabout the extent of an institution’s market risk exposurebeyond that conveyed by simply knowing the relative size of thetrading account. In contrast, when we look at...

[...]The purpose of this article is to build on this earlier work, bythe Basel Committee and others, and to consider the issues thatwould have to be addressed in developing a regulatory minimumcapital standard based on banks’ internal credit risk models. Inconducting this exercise, we consider...