The thesis consists of two essays: "The CAPM -- A General Equilibrium Foundation" and "The Foreign Exchange Rate in Financial Markets".The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is one of the most successful models for portfolio selection. The utility functions are assumed to depend positively on...

The last decades were marked with an increasing involvement of multi-product manufacturers into cross-border business activities. Dealing with heterogeneous needs of consumers in different countries is one of the biggest challenges in the modern business. Correspondingly, special importance is...

The CME Nikkei 225 "Quanto" futures contract settles against the Nikkei Index but taken to refer to US dollars. In contrast, the corresponding "Vanilla" instruments trading in Singapore and Osaka, settle in Yen.We show that the returns to the Quanto future are correlated with returns to the US...

In this paper we inquire why after more than 25 years of domestic agricultural reforms in Mexico and 15 years of trade liberalization of maize under NAFTA –a non-competitive crop and the major staple in Mexico–domestic production of this field crop has increased. We present new empirical...

In this paper, we examine the determinants of inflation differentials in a panel of the newEuropean Union member states vis-‡-vis the euro area in 1997-2007. Our main results are as follows. Exchange rate appreciation and higher price level in the new EU members is associated with narrower...

In this paper, we present evidence on the statistical features of observed dispersion in HICP inflation rates in the Euro area. Our descriptive exercise shows that there is still a remarkable dispersion of HICP inflation rates across the member countries. We find that most of dispersion...

"The common-property literature has often focused on the question of efficiency. Here we consider distributional issues instead. How should the benefits of the commons (say, a fishery) be distributed? We approach the question from the viewpoint of ownership rather than income redistribution. "A...

"Institutional approaches to social dilemmas have so far focused on how to create incentive structures that channel individuals' behavior into socially desirable outcomes assuming that everyone is selfish. However, the presumption of universal selfishness is not only empirically invalid but may...

"In this study, individual level behavior is investigated in the context of computer assisted voluntary contribution mechanism public good (VCM) provision experiments and common pool resource (CPR) appropriation experiments. Previous studies of these environments have concentrated on aggregate...