We investigate the cost of capital in a model with an agency conflict between inside managers and outside shareholders. Inside ownership reflects the classic tradeoff between incentives and risk diversification, and the severity of agency costs depends on a parameter representing investor...

Traditionally, financial systems have been bank-based or market-based. The efficiency properties of these systems are compared in various dimensions. These include risk sharing, information provision, funding new industries, corporate governance, and law, finance and politics. Both systems have...

We study the economic sources of stock-bond return comovement and its time variation using a dynamic factor model. We identify the economic factors employing structural and non-structural vector autoregressive models for economic state variables such as interest rates, (expected) inflation,...

Consisting of teams working with firm level data, the International Study Group on Exports and Productivity has used comparable micro level panel data for 14 countries and a set of identically specified empirical models to investigate the relationship between exports and productivity. The...

The ratio of global trade to GDP declined by nearly 30 percent during the global recession of 2008-2009. This large drop in international trade has generated significant attention and concern. Did the decline simply reflect the severity of the recession for traded goods industries? Or...

Despite a large and growing theoretical literature on flights to safety, there does not appear to exist an empirical characterization of flight-to-safety (FTS) episodes. Using only data on bond and stock returns, we identify and characterize flight to safety episodes for 23 countries. On...

Vor nunmehr 40 Jahren erschien ein Text, der in vielerlei Hinsicht bahnbrechend war und der es wert ist, in Erinnerung gerufen zu werden. 1966 formulierte Kenneth E. Boulding in seinem Aufsatz »The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth« bemerkenswerte Visionen zur Bewirtschaftung der Erde...

This research explores the origins of the distribution of time preference across regions. It advances the hypothesis, and establishes empirically, that geographical variations in natural land productivity and their impact on the return to agricultural investment have had a persistent effect on...

[Einleitung] Die Verhandlungen der 21. Vertragsstaatenkonferenz der Klimarahmenkonvention im Dezember 2015 in Paris galten als richtungsweisend für die internationale Klimapolitik. Nach fünf Jahren intensiver Vorbereitungen hätte ein erneutes Scheitern, wie bei der Kopenhagen-Konferenz im...