Central banks often use certain concentration indices in their official reports to determine the degree of intensity of competition, of which the most common are the concentration ratio and the Herfindahl-Hirschman index. It is important to emphasize that when calculating the value of these...

This paper explores the impact of technological change on industry concentration and the underlying firm dynamics. In the agent-based model EURACE@Unibi I implement a paradigm shift in the technological frontier - a shift from a slow to a fast growing regime. The analysis shows that the...

Nicolas Véron responds to the UK Financial Reporting Council's Discussion paper on choice in the UK audit market.

Using a variance decomposition approach, we examine the importance of accounting information - in particular the cash flow and accruals components of earnings - in explaining the variation in UK company stock returns. We extend prior research by analysing whether auditor quality moderates the...

Das englische National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) wird in der bundesdeutschen Diskussion um die Reform der Institutionen zur Konkretisierung des Leistungskatalogs in der GKV entweder als Vorbild oder als abschreckendes Beispiel genannt. Die Analyse der von NICE angewandten...

Background: Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is a common cause of respiratory infection that is highly prevalent in infants. Severe cases of RSV infection require hospitalisation; this is most likely to occur in infant populations at high risk. The study assesses the cost-effectiveness of...

The issue of whether employees who work more hours than they want to suffer adverse health consequences is important not only at the individual level but also for governmental formation of work time policy. Our study investigates this question by analyzing the impact of the discrepancy between...

Microeconomic theory predicts that under certain regularity conditions higher idiosyncratic risk increases the propensity to insure against independent marketable risks. We apply these predictions to the specific case of labor income risk and car insurance using data from the UK. The main...

Countries often spend billions on university research. There is growing interest in how to assess whether that money is well spent. Is there an objective way to assess the quality of a nation's world-leading science? I attempt to suggest a method, and illustrate it with modern data on economics....

Taxation data have been used to create long-run series for the distribution of top incomes in quite a number of countries. Most of these studies have focused on the national experience of individual countries, but we can also learn from cross-country comparisons. Comparative analysis is...