We take a first pass at quantifying the magnitudes of debt relief achieved through default and restructuring in two distinct samples: 1979-2010, focusing on credit events in emerging markets, and 1920-1939, documenting the official debt hangover in advanced economies that was created by World...

Cumulative prospect theory introduced the weighting of probabilities as an additional component to capture risk attitudes. However, this addition would be a less significant challenge to expected utility theory (EU) if utility curvature and probability weighting showed strong positive...

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We study experimentally voluntary contributions to public goods when none, some, or all previous decisions are observable. When agents observe previous moves, they tend to condition their cooperation on observed cooperation. This leads to two effects of increased transparency: on the one hand,...

Consumer bankruptcy regulation in the United States as well as in many other countries allow consumers to petition for a partial debt discharge. Usually, a debt release is possible when the debtor behaves in the creditors’ best interest and after filing for bankruptcy signs over her entire...

We incorporate trade in tasks à la Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) into a small open economy version of the theory of firm organization of Marin and Verdier (2012) to examine how offshoring affects the way firms organize. We show that the offshoring of production tasks leads firms to...

We show that the countries of the former Austro-Hungarian monarchy trade significantly more with one another in the aftermath of the collapse of the Iron Curtain than predicted by a standard gravity model. This trade surplus declines linearly and monotonically over time. We argue that these...

In this paper, I evaluate the impact of innovative activity of financial agents on their fragility in a competitive framework. There exist a vast array of concerns about the interconnection of financial innovations, financial distress of firms and financial crises provided by theoretical...

This paper investigates the economic returns to language skills and bilingualism. The analysis is staged in Kazakhstan, a multi-ethnic country with complex ethnic settlement patterns that has switched its official state language from Russian to Kazakh. Using two newly assembled data sets, we...

In this paper, we evaluate firm-, industry- and country-specific factors determining a firm's capital structure. The empirical validity of several capital structure theories has been ambiguous so far. We shed light on the main drivers of leverage and depict differences in industry and country...