Using a GARCH model, we study the effects of Canadian and U.S. central bank communication and macroeconomic news on Canadian bond, stock, and foreign exchange market returns and volatility. First, central bank communication and macro news from both countries have an impact on Canadian financial...

The statement “institutions matter” has become commonplace. A precondition for it to be supported by empirical evidence, is, however, that institutions are measurable. Glaeser et al. (2004) attacks many studies claiming to prove the relevance of institutions for economic development as being...

Analysis of the economic effects of constitutional rules has made substantial progress over the last decade. This survey provides an overview of this rapidly growing research area and also discusses a number of methodological issues and identifies underresearched areas. It argues that the next...

I argue that the rule of law consists of many dimensions and that much information is lost when variables proxying for these dimensions are simply aggregated. I draw on the most important innovations from various legal traditions to propose a concept of the rule of law likely to find general...

Advances in competition economics as well as in computational and empirical methods have offered the scope for the employment of merger simulation models in merger control procedures during the past almost 15 years. Merger simulation is, nevertheless, still a very young and innovative instrument...

Traditional measures of spatial industry concentration are restricted to given areal units. They do not make allowance for the fact that concentration may be differently pronounced at various geographical levels. Methods of spatial point pattern analysis allow to measure industry concentration...

In “The Myth of the Rational Voter” Brian Caplan shows that voters entertain systematically biased beliefs on a number of essential issues of economic policy and concludes that this leads democracies to choose bad policies. We introduce the psychological concept of mental models to address...

Using a GARCH model, we study the effects of U.S. monetary policy and macroeconomic announcements on Argentine money, stock, and foreign exchange markets over the period January 1998 to July 2007. We show, first, that both types of news have a significant impact on all markets. Second, there are...

Advanced economic instruments like simulation models are enjoying an increased popularity in practical antitrust. There is hope that they – being quantitative predictive economic evidence – can substitute for qualitative structural analysis and lead to unambiguous results. This paper...

Zur Messung räumlicher Konzentration ökonomischer Aktivitäten stehen verschiedene Verfahren zur Verfügung. Nachstehend wird mit den distanzbasierten uni- und bivariaten KFunktionen eine neue Methode vorgestellt, die Vorteile gegenüber den herkömmlichen, auf regionaler Abgrenzung...