When designing incentives for a manager, the trade-off between insurance and a "good" allocation of effort across various tasks is often identified with a trade-off between the responsiveness (sensitivity, precision, signal-noise ratio) of the performance measure and its similarity (congruity,...

This report reviews recent as well as planned changes to accounting and solvency regulations affecting insurers and pension funds and how they may impact long-term investing by these institutions. The review of existing evidence focuses mainly on the impact of risk-based solvency requirements,...

We examine a situation where efforts on different tasks positively affect production but are not separately verifiable and where the manager (principal) and the worker (agent) have different ideas about how production should be carried out: agents prefer a less efficient way of production. We...

Following Chairman Ben Bernanke’s comments before Congress that the FOMC may ‘take a step down in the pace of asset purchases if economic improvement appears to be sustained’, US 10-year interest rates picked up sharply and gross capital flows to emerging market economies (EMEs) reversed....

Sweden ranks among the best OECD countries in terms of gender equality. Women have a high employment rate, outperform men in education and are well represented in government and parliament. Nevertheless, without further policy measures, achieving parity is still a distant prospect in several...

This paper reviews empirical research on finance and labour markets. Preliminary themes in the literature follow. Finance may interact with labour market institutions to jointly determine labour outcomes. Highly leveraged firms show greater employment volatility during cyclical fluctuations, and...

While small- and medium sized firms in Austria are generally more productive, export more, and engage more in higher technology activities than in comparable countries, they need to adapt better to the knowledge economy to maintain their relative performance levels. The capital structure of...

Beyond bitcoin, blockchain technology has acquired attention and importance in its own right. Today, it is conceptually accepted that blockchain stands out as a disruptive technology that will change a number of processes in financial services and could in turn impact corporate governance. This...

Slovenia is facing the legacy of a boom-bust cycle that has been compounded by weak corporate governance of state-owned banks. The levels of non-performing loans and capital adequacy ratios compare poorly in international perspective and may deteriorate further, which could require significant...

The study assesses the role of feed-in tariffs (FITs) and renewable energy certificates (RECs) in creating incentives for cross-border investments and for investments in particular technological portfolios via M&A. The analysis explores the dataset on M&As in alternative energy sources worldwide...