The payoff of many credit derivatives depends on the level of credit spreads. In particular, the payoff of credit derivatives with a leverage component is sensitive to jumps in the underlying credit spreads. In the framework of first passage time models we extend the model introduced in...

This volume was prepared by Jens Ruhose while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2014 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes four self-contained chapters that contribute to the understanding of the...

This thesis strives to offer new insights in two main areas. First, in the well-researched domain of payment cards chapters 2 and 3 investigate an aspect that has hitherto been scantly examined, namely, the fact that merchant usage fees differ substantially among merchant sectors. Additionally,...

This dissertation consists of four distinct empirical essays that address various aspects of the economics of education. Chapters 2 and 3 show that patience and risk-taking as intertemporal preferences are closely related to differences in student achievement across and within countries. Chapter...

This dissertation consists of six self-contained chapters that are related to the behavior of firms and politicians in a broader sense. After an introduction to the topic, the first part of the dissertation elaborates on how institutional and political framework conditions influence the behavior...

Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht die Aufteilung eines Budgets auf mehrere öffentliche Güter mittels einer Abstimmung. Hierzu betrachten wir Abstimmungsregeln, unter denen jeder Agent eine Budgetaufteilung vorschlägt und dann aus diesen Vorschlägen eine Budgetaufteilung (Allokation) bestimmt...

This doctoral dissertation analyses the transmission of monetary policy. It applies a variety of empirical methods to study how conventional and unconventional monetary policy measures transmit to different macroeconomic and financial variables. The first article analyses the effect of monetary...