Despite the importance attributed to the effects of diversity on the stability and prosperity of nations, the origins of the uneven distribution of ethnic and cultural fragmentation across countries have been underexplored. Building on the role of deeply-rooted biogeographical forces in...

In the field of mergers and acquisitions, German and international tax law allow for several opportunities to step up a firm's assets, i.e., to revaluate the assets at fair market values. When a step-up is performed the taxpayer recognizes a taxable gain, but also obtains tax benefits in the...

We test the quantity theory of money (QTM) using a novel approach and a large new sample. We do not follow the usual approach of first differentiating the logarithm of the Cambridge equation to obtain an equation relating the growth rate of real GDP, the growth rate of money and inflation. These...

There is strong empirical evidence that countries with lower per capita income tend to have smaller trade volumes even after controlling for aggregate income. Furthermore, poorer countries do not just trade less, but have a lower number of trading partners. In this paper, I construct and...

We show that political booms, measured by the rise in governments’ popularity, predict financial crises above and beyond other better-known early warning indicators, such as credit booms. This predictive power, however, only holds in emerging economies. We show that governments in emerging...

Worldwide demographic changes and their implications for governments, corporations, and individuals have been in the focus of public interest for quite some time due to the fiscal risk related to adequate retirement benefits. Through a more detailed analysis of mortality data an additional type...

Der vorliegende Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit der Aufarbeitung der Hintergründe der Subprime-Krise sowie der nachfolgenden internationalen Banken- und Finanzkrisen. Auf dieser Basis werden Vor-schläge diskutiert, wie die erkannten Schwachstellen im Finanzsystem repariert bzw. behoben werden...

This paper presents the technical background for our computable general equilibrium (CGE) analysis of different worldwide liberalization scenarios in agricultural markets. The main features of the examined agricultural protection policies are explained and descriptions of the applied economic...

The cost-effectiveness of unilateral emission abatement can be seriously hampered by emission leakage. We assess three widely-discussed proposals for leakage reduction targeted at energy-intensive and trade-exposed industries: border tax adjustments, output-based allocation and industry...