This paper deals with fiscal policy over the business cycle when international financial markets are imperfect. I document evidence that government expenditure tends to be more procyclical the higher is the borrowing cost for a sovereign. Decomposing government expenditure components shows that...

Applying the Monti-Klein framework, we examine the optimal financing strategy of a fi rm that requires funding for individual projects at an imperfect credit market. In particular, we study under which circumstances the firm should raise debt for projects separately (decentralized funding) or...

In a fair division game an indivisible object with an unknown common value is owned by a group of individuals and should be allocated to one of them while the others are compensated monetarily. Implementing fair division games in the lab, we fi nd many occurrences of the winner's curse under the...

Bank liability guarantee schemes have traditionally been viewed as costless measures to shore up investor confidence and stave off bank runs. However, as the experience of some European countries, most notably Ireland, has demonstrated, the credibility and effectiveness of these guarantees is...

Expectations matter for economic activity. To the extent that they are fundamentally unwarranted, they represent "undue optimism or pessimism" (Pigou, 1927). In this paper, we identify empirically the effect of undue optimism/pessism ("optimism shocks") on economic activity. In a first step, we...

In this paper, we analyse nominal exchange rate and price dynamics after risk shocks with short-term interest rates constrained by the zero lower bound (ZLB). We show with a stylized theoretical model that temporary risk shocks may lead to permanent shifts of the exchange rate and the price...

Although discrete hours choice models have become the workhorse in labor supply analyses. Yet, they are often criticized for being a black box due to their numerous underlying modeling assumptions, with respect to, e.g., the functional form, unobserved error components or several exogeneity...

This paper provides empirical evidence that Accelerated Vehicle Programs exhibit a positive influence on car registrations using unique aggregate monthly data for 23 OECD countries from 2000 to 2010. The effect is still traceable if dynamic panel data fixed effects methods are used to address...

Significant policy effort is devoted to stimulate the development, adoption and diffusion of environmental-friendly technology. Sceptics worry about the effects of regulation-induced environmental technology on firms competitiveness. Since innovation is a crucial productivity driver, a potential...

In this paper we analyze how rati cation uncertainty impacts the optimal terms of international environmental agreements (IEAs). We relax the frequent assumption of countries as unitary actors by modeling the rati cation stage through uncertain preferences of a ratifying agent (e.g. the pivotal...