We investigate the political determinants of risk premiums which sub-national governments in Switzerland have to pay for their sovereign bond emissions. For this purpose we make use of financial market data from 288 tradable cantonal bonds in the period from 1981 to 2007. Our main focus is on...

In order to reach the two degree target it is necessary to control CO2 emissions also in fast growing emerging economies such as India. The question is how the Indian economy would be affected by e.g. including the country into an international climate regime. Existing analyses with either a...

This study investigates the bank competition-stability nexus using a unique regulatory dataset provided by the Deutsche Bundesbank over the period 1994 to 2010. First, we use outright bank defaults as the most direct measure of bank risk available and contrast the results to weaker forms of bank...

We provide evidence on the growth patterns of microfinance clients. Our analysis is motivated by the debate on the impact of microfinance on client income and growth. Based on loan-level data from close to 40,000 clients in Sub-Saharan Africa we make use of an econometric approach widely...

Using fiscal reaction functions for a panel of actual euro-area countries the paper investigates whether euro membership has reduced the responsiveness of countries to increases in the level of inherited debt compared to the period prior to succession to the euro. While we find some evidence for...

One explanation for the poor performance of regulation in the recent financial crisis is that regulators had been captured by the financial sector. We present a micro-founded model with rational agents in which banks may capture regulators due to their high degree of sophistication. Banks can...

Foster and Hart proposed an operational measure of riskiness for discrete random variables. We show that their defining equation has no solution for many common continuous distributions. We show how to extend consistently the definition of riskiness to continuous random variables. For many...

This paper makes use of Hierarchical Bayes Models to model and estimate spatial health effects. We focus on Germany, combining rich individual-level household panel data with administrative county level information to estimate spatial county-level health dependencies. As dependent variable, we...

Growth is associated with (i) shifts in the sectoral structure of the economy, (ii) changes in relative prices and (iii) the Kaldor facts. Moreover, (iv) cross-sectional data shows systematic differences in the expenditure structure across income groups. This paper presents a growth model which...

Motivated by the observation that access to evasion opportunities is dis- tributed heterogeneously across the labor market, this paper examines the extent to which labor supply elasticities with respect to tax rates depend on such evasion opportunities. We rst discuss the channels through which...