The rapid diffusion of the internet and electronic commerce changes the way business and international trade take place. The new economy poses new challenges to the international regulatory framework, since small distortions due to differing sets of regulations and taxation between countries...

International trade statistics and input-output tables are analyzed in order to test the hypothesis that international production networks have become more relevant. The share of imported inputs in the gross output value of the motor vehicle industry has grown significantly during the last two...

We employ a combination of school fixed effects and IV estimation to estimate the effect of class size on student performance in 18 countries. Using the random part of the class-size variation between two adjacent grades within individual schools allows us to identify causal class-size effects....

Bank capital regulation seems to be today's most accepted regulatory instrument. The reasoning is that limited liability and deposit insurance appear to give banks incentives for excessive risk-taking. Capital requirements can alleviate this problem as banks are obliged to hold more capital...

Biodiversity can sometimes only be preserved if natural habitats are excluded from human uses. Such protection measures generate positive externalities at the global scale. This holds especially for protection in developing countries that host great parts of global biodiversity. For...

Nationally implemented protected area measures for biodiversity conservation generate cross-border externalities. For internalizing these externalities at the international level, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) has been established as a multilateral mechanism of transfer. This paper...

Genetische Ressourcen sind Lebewesen, die genetischen Informationen in sich tragen, welche für die biotechnologische Forschung und Entwicklung von Bedeutung sind. Angesichts eines sich beschleunigenden weltweiten Artenverlustes stellt sich die Frage, ob durch den privaten Handel mit genetische...

We explore the link between international stock market comovement and the degree to which firms operate globally. Using stock returns and balance sheet data for companies in 20 countries, we estimate a factor model that decomposes stock returns into global, country-specific and industry-specific...

Globalization has affected business cycle developments in OECD countries and has increased activities of firms across national borders. This paper analyzes whether these two developments are linked. We use a new firm-level dataset on the foreign activities of German firms to test whether foreign...

We analyze foreigners' and domestic institutional investors' positions in U.S. equities. Controlling for many factors, we uncover a common preference for large firms and firms that are diversified internationally. The domestic preference for internationally diversified firms implies that...