Insurance products are distributed both by independent and dependent agents, although the use of independent agents is more costly. The product quality hypothesis states that independent agents provide both insurers and customers with higher service quality and therefore, remain on the market....

The paper begins with a comparative analysis of the evolutionary legal path adopted by United States, People's Republic of China and European Union with reference to the F/Rand commitments on Standard Essential Patents. In the light of the wide differences which characterize the above-mentioned...

Newspapers' advertising revenues have declined sharply in recent decades. We build a model to investigate the consequences on newspapers' content and prices of a reduction in advertisers' willingness to pay. Newspapers choose the size of their newsroom, and readers are heterogeneous in the...

We examine incidents in which Japanese businesses are implicated in corporate scandals. Such firms suffer statistically significant losses in their market values. Given the negligible legal and regulatory penalties for Japanese companies, we interpret the results as convincing evidence on the...

Buenos Aires and Chicago grew during the nineteenth century for remarkably similar reasons. Both cities were conduits for moving meat and grain from fertile hinterlands to eastern markets. However, despite their initial similarities, Chicago was vastly more prosperous for most of the twentieth...

Food quality has become an important determinant of success in global food trade and growers for international markets have to continuously adjust to buyers’ requirements. It is however not clear to what extent there is a demand for food quality - and how much buyers are willing to pay for it...

We examine evidence for a systematic underperformance of Germany's state-owned banks in the current financial crisis and study if the bank losses can be traced to the quality of bank governance. For this purpose, we examine the biographical background of 593 supervisory board members in the 29...

This article sheds light on the extent of managerial pay in the OECD. It uses a novel database on managerial wages and other types of compensation to compare managerial remuneration across different sectors, especially, the financial sector, and across countries. We find evidence of a...