A frequently employed argument against imposing international sanctions is that rival superpowers are likely to bust sanctions to simultaneously shield the target, harm the sender, and make a profit. We evaluate the legitimacy of this concern by studying the effect of US sanctions on trade flows...

In this paper, we analyze whether the complexity of tax bills affects financial markets. Based on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level of the 32 tax bills identified by Romer and Romer (2010) in the period 1962–2003, we assess the relationship between tax bills' complexity and financial markets...

A frequently employed argument against imposing international sanctions is that rival superpowers are likely to bust sanctions to simultaneously shield the target, harm the sender, and make a profit. We evaluate the legitimacy of this concern by studying the effect of US sanctions on trade flows...

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the West has been intensively discussing its support strategy. Hawkish positions of strengthening Ukraine via armaments, financial resources, and sanctions against Russia compete with dovish views of avoiding further escalation of the...

Recursively identified vector autoregressive (VAR) models often lead to a counterintuitive response of prices (and output) shortly after a monetary policy shock. To overcome this problem, we propose to estimate the VAR parameters under the restriction that economic theory is not violated, while...

We propose a novel dynamic mixture vector autoregressive (VAR) model in which time-varying mixture weights are driven by the predictive likelihood score. Intuitively, the state weight of the k-th component VAR model in the subsequent period is increased if the current observation is more likely...

The use of economic sanctions has increased rapidly since the end of the Cold War. Economic sanctions can inflict huge economic costs on target countries. Sanctions may also have unintended effects and cause collateral damage. The effectiveness of sanctions in terms of meeting the proximate...

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the West has been intensively discussing its support strategy. Hawkish positions of strengthening Ukraine via armaments, financial resources, and sanctions against Russia compete with dovish views of avoiding further escalation of the...

We propose a novel dynamic mixture vector autoregressive (VAR) model in which timevarying mixture weights are driven by the predictive likelihood score. Intuitively, the state weight of the k-th component VAR model in the subsequent period is increased if the current observation is more likely...

Research and public interest on economic inequality have grown over the last years. Family firms and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few wealthy business families have been discussed as both a cause and a consequence of economic inequality. Yet, so far, we lack knowledge...