This essay begins by looking closely at the underlying structural causes of the discontinuity that appeared in the behavior of the U.S. stock market at 2:40pm in the afternoon of 6th May 2010, because the emblematic “catastrophic” aspect of the collapse of equity prices, and their subsequent...

The collapse of an investment mania usually reminds people that the phrase "This time is different" is dangerous. Recollections of this mantra then typically either state outright or at least imply that "It is never different." However, there is at least one counterexample to this cautious view,...

Bitcoin is traded in a number of exchanges, and there is a large and time-varying price dispersion among them. We identify the sources of price dispersion using a standard time-varying vector auto-regression model with stochastic volatility. Using weekly data over the past 3 years, we find that...

Uniswap is a decentralized exchange (DEX) and was first launched on November 2, 2018 on the Ethereum mainnet [1] and is part of an Ecosystem of products in Decentralized Finance (DeFi). It replaces a traditional order book type of trading common on centralized exchanges (CEX) with a...

How do you value companies which have IPOed recently? How do you compare them amongst their peers? Valuing companies using a linear extrapolation of their revenues and profits leads to an ingenious method to benchmark stocks against each other. Here we present such a method, dubbed the growth...

Bitcoin, exchangeable for legal tender, and blockchain, the novel form of digital ledger technology it is based on, are often confused and conflated. We make the case that, in some respects, this conflation is justified. The price action in Bitcoin is consistent with a prototyping phase of a new...

On March 31st, 2023, the Italian data protection authority found that ChatGPT violated data protection laws and banned the service in Italy, providing a natural experiment to assess the economic consequences of generative AI. Leveraging this event, we show that Italian firms with greater...

In dieser Studie werden die Anreize für Innovationsaktivitäten von Firmen mit beschränkter und unbeschränkter Haftung untersucht. Innovationen sind mit einem gewissen Risiko behaftet. Firmeneigner können ihr persönliches Risiko jedoch begrenzen, wenn das Unternehmen eine Rechstform mit...

This paper analyzes the link between the diffusion of information- and communication technology (ICT) and both the skill structure and employment expectations of the different skill categories. The analysis is based on cross-sectional data for 4150 German firms conducted in mid-2000. The...

This paper discusses the incentives for innovation when liability is limited or not. Clearly innovative activity involves risk. On the one hand, the risk of firm owners is limited if their liability is limited. On the other hand credits will be more difficult to receive if liability is limited....