While companies have emerged as very proactive donors in the wake of recent major disasters like Hurricane Katrina, it remains unclear whether that corporate generosity generates benefits to firms themselves. The literature on strategic philanthropy suggests that such philanthropic behavior may...

We use a new panel dataset of credit card accounts to analyze how consumer responded to the 2001 Federal income tax rebates. We estimate the monthly response of credit card payments, spending, and debt, exploiting the unique, randomized timing of the rebate disbursement. We find that, on...

The European Central Bank has assigned a special role to money in its two pillar strategy and has received much criticism for this decision. The case against including money in the central banks interest rate rule is based on a standard model of the monetary transmission process that underlies...

We investigate co-movements and heterogeneity in inflation dynamics of different regions within and across euro area countries using a novel disaggregate dataset to improve the understanding of inflation differentials in the European Monetary Union. We employ a model where regional inflation...

Based on a broad set of regional aggregated and disaggregated consumer price index (CPI) data from major industrialized countries in Asia, North America and Europe we are examining the role that national borders play for goods market integration. In line with the existing literature we find that...

Securitization is a financial innovation that experiences a boom-bust cycle, as many other innovations before. This paper analyzes possible reasons for the breakdown of primary and secondary securitization markets, and argues that misaligned incentives along the value chain are the primary cause...

The German Retirement Saving Act instituted a new funded system of supplementary pensions coupled with a general reduction in the level of state pay-as-you-go old-age pensions. In order to qualify for tax relief, the providers of supplementary savings products must offer a guarantee of the...

The globalization of markets and companies has increased the demand for internationally comparable high quality accounting information resulting from a common set of accounting rules. Despite remarkable efforts of international harmonization for more than 25 years, accounting regulation is still...

The predictive likelihood is of particular relevance in a Bayesian setting when the purpose is to rank models in a forecast comparison exercise. This paper discusses how the predictive likelihood can be estimated for any subset of the observable variables in linear Gaussian state-space models...

Der vorliegende Aufsatz stellt die Vorgehensweise und die wichtigsten Ergebnisse einer internationalen Finanzplatzstudie vor, die im Jahre 1998 im Auftrag des Center for Financial Studies (Frankfurt am Main) durchgeführt wurde. Ziel dieser Studie war es, aus der Analyse wichtiger...