Bailouts sponsored by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are famous for their conditionality: in return for continued installments of desperately needed loans, governments must comply with austere policy changes. Many have suggested, however, that politically important countries face rather...

This paper attempts to find an aggregate leading indicator to predict the spreads observed for high-yield (HY) bond indices. Using a vector error correction (VEC) specification for quarterly data, we establish a long-term equilibrium relationship between the HY market spreads and its...

The Doha multilateral round of trade negotiations sponsored by the WTO has been dragging on for over a decade, with no end in sight. In this short paper we assess empirically what determines the duration of trade negotiations, focusing on the span between the start of trade talks and their...

This research studies whether the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol achieves its objective of emission reductions in the host countries. It empirically investigates the impacts of CDM projects on CO2 emission reductions for 60 CDM host countries over 2005-10. This research...

The London InterBank Offered Rate (LIBOR) is the most important set of interest rate benchmarks. Recently there have been reports about systematic manipulation of the LIBOR. We thus investigate incentives and possibilities to rig the LIBOR or related statistics for quote submitting panel banks....

[Einleitung] Chancen und Risiken der Gewinnung von Erdgas oder -öl aus unkonventionellen Lagerstätten und das dabei zum Einsatz kommende Verfahren des Hydraulic Fracturing (Fracking, deutsch: aufbrechen) werden derzeit in der Politik und Öffentlichkeit intensiv diskutiert. Als...

This paper surveys the law and economics literature on WTO dispute settlement. As a background, we first briefly lay out main features of the legal framework, and discuss possible roles of a dispute settlement mechanism. We then discuss the two main themes in the empirical literature on dispute...