This article contributes to the literature on the Law of One Price (LOP) and absolute Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) in two ways. First, it uses a novel set of PPP data from the International Comparison Programme for OECD countries and 195 internationally comparable products from 1980 to 1996....

This paper develops a structural empirical general equilibrium model of aggregate bilateral trade with path dependence of country-pair level exporter status. Such path dependence is motivated through informational costs about serving a foreign market for first-time entry of (firms in) an export...

Controlled foreign company (CFC) rules are frequently imposed by countries as part of their anti-tax-avoidance legislation. This paper aims at quantifying their impact on foreign investments by utilizing a regression discontinuity design and the universe of German foreign investments notified to...

One of the most notable events of the world economy over the past twenty years has been the phenomenal growth in the number of international economic integration agreements, such as free trade agreements. This paper discusses the roles of “competitive liberalization” by nations’...

Bilateral investment treaties (BITs) have proliferated over the past 50 years such that the number of pairs of countries with BITs is roughly as large as the number of country-pairs that belong to bilateral or regional preferential trade agreements (PTAs). The purpose of this study is to provide...

This paper proposes a model where heterogeneous firms choose whether to undertake R&D or not. Innovative firms are more productive, have larger investment opportunities and lower own funds for necessary tangible continuation investments than non-innovating firms. As a result, they are...

Österreich und Deutschland sind nicht nur Nachbarländer sondern auch in der Geschichte Mitteleuropas historisch eng verbunden - so sehr, daß Österreicher und Deutsche neben der gemeinsamen Sprache auch wichtige Grundüberzeugungen politischer, sozialer und kultureller Art teilen. Trotzdem...

This paper presents empirical evidence of a positive effect of council size on government spending using a dataset of 2,056 municipalities in the German state of Bavaria over a period of 21 years. We apply a regression discontinuity design to avoid an endogeneity bias. In particular, we exploit...