It is commonly thought that an open economy can accommodate output shocks through either exchange rate or real sector adjustments. We formalise this notion by incorporating labour market rigidities into an 'escape clause' model of currency crises. We show that the absence of structural reform...

Finland experienced an extremely severe economic depression in the early 1990s. In the midst of this crisis, significant new legislation was passed that increased supervisory powers of financial market regulators and reformed bankruptcy procedures, significantly decreasing the protection of...

We study the interaction between private and public funding of innovative projects in the presence of adverse-selection based financing constraints. Government programmes allocating direct subsidies are based on ex-ante screening of the subsidy applications. This selection scheme may yield...

A sweeping and protracted reform of corporate law took place in Finland in the 1970s. The reform brought significant improvements to investor protection and, similar to the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act, tightened disclosure rules at the cost of increasing the work load in corporate reporting. We find...

We study whether and to what extent financial exchange innovations are in practice patentable in Europe. We find that exchange-related applications initially increased significantly after the State Street decision but subsequently decreased. The clear majority (65%) of applications come from the...

This paper studies the welfare effects of R&D subsidies. We develop a model of continuous optimal treatment with outcome heterogeneity where the treatment outcome depends on applicant investment. The model takes into account heterogeneous application costs and identifies the treatment effect on...

Consider a competitive bank whose illiquid asset portfolio is funded by short-term debt that has to be refinanced before the asset matures. We show that in this setting maximal transparency is not socially optimal, and that the existence of social externalities of bank failures further lowers...

We study the value of innovation in a case study of one of the most visible innovative products in recent years, Apple’s iPhone. The value effects of news announcements, patent publications, and trademarks relating to iPhone are taken into account. Our estimate of the lower bound on the value...

Economic interest in innovation policy largely arises from the fundamental importance of innovation to social welfare and from inefficiencies in innovation in a competitive market environment. As a result, a wide variety of public innovation policies are used in practice. This study reviews the...

A unique Finnish household-level data from 1994 to 2009 allow us to measure how households’ financial expectations are related to the subsequent outcomes. We use the difference between the two to measure forecast errors and household optimism and link the errors to households’ borrowing...