Mihail Manoilescu was one of the main intellectual personalities of the interwar period in Romania. He was known as a politician and a central banker, but also as an economist. From the very beginning of his theoretical and practical career, or at least from the late 1920s till the end of his...

Did the nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima in March 2011 cause individuals to reappraise the risks they attach to nuclear power plants? We investigate the change in housing prices in the U.S. after the Fukushima event to test the hypothesis that house prices in the proximity of power plants fell...

Social and cultural determinants of economic institutions and outcomes have come to the forefront of economic research. We introduce religiosity, measured as the share for which religion is important in daily life, to explain institutional quality in the form of property rights and the rule of...

We analyze theoretically banks choice of organization and leverage in branches or subsidiaries in the presence of organizational and financial synergies, government bailouts, bankruptcy costs and varying correlations between risk-factors. The social efficiency of banks’ choices are analyzed as...

In this paper we present one possible historical reconstruction of the German historical school in Bulgaria for the period 1878 – 1944. The main postulates of the historical school which claimed to be a general theoretical model for newly emerging and backward economies suited well the...

Longevity risk transfer is a popular choice for annuity providers such as pension funds. This paper formalizes the trade-off between the cost and the risk relief of such choice, when the annuity provider uses value- at-risk to assess risk. Using first-order approximations we show that, if the...

This paper examines the impact of trade and political institutions on environmental quality in Africa and explores whether political institutions matter to the trade-environment relationship. We use data from a large group of African countries, covering the period 1990-2008 and two indicators of...

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether people treat all forms of uncertainty in the same way. Studies investigating known-risk gambles and ambiguous gambles have systematically used the urn context. Little systematic research has investigated differences in expressed attitude as a...

In the developing world, kidnapping is relatively common, and a market for kidnap insurance has arisen in response. We provide a model that allows us to analyze how kidnap insurance will affect the interaction between the kidnapper and the victim’s family when both are self-interested and have...

In many works Deirdre McCloskey criticizes professional economics for ignoring virtues. Even though I disagree with details of her analysis I concur with her general conclusions. In the paper I sketch my own perspective on how economists could profit from the virtue discourse as developed by...