infonet-economy

We study the effect of culture on financial literacy by comparing secondary-school students along the German-French language border within Switzerland. We find that students in the Frenchspeaking
area have a lower level of financial literacy than students in the German-speaking area. The difference in financial literacy across the language groups is mainly observed for native…

The financialization of crude oil markets over the last decade has changed the behavior of oil prices in fundamental ways. In this paper, we uncover the gradual transformation of crude oil from a physical to a financial asset. Although economic demand and supply factors continue to play an important role, recent indicators associated with financialization have emerged since 2008. We…

This paper analyzes whether the financial distress of a firm affects the investment decisions of non-distressed competitors. On average, firms in distress impose indirect costs to non-distressed competitors by increasing costs of credit in the industry and hence restricting credit access and investment. These average negative spillover effects continue to hold in the absence of…

This paper investigates the impact of human barriers to international trade using ancestral distance as a measure of the relatedness between populations. In a new data set covering the universe of global trade, our findings document that country pairs with a high ancestral distance are less likely to trade with each other (extensive margin) and if they do trade, ancestral distance…

This paper evaluates the effects of awarding vouchers for vocational training on the employment outcomes of unemployed voucher recipients in Germany, as well as the potential mechanism through which they operate. This study assesses the direct effects of voucher assignment net of ac¬tual redemption, which may be driven by preference shaping and learning about possible human capital…

Russia’s new Concept of the State Migration Policy until 2025 (the CSMP) was approved on 13 June 2012. As the first comprehensive, nationwide document on migration policy in the modern history of Russia, it marks the beginning of a decisive reform of the country’s migration policy by departing from the existing focus on temporary foreign workers. The emphasis of the CSMP is on…

Insurance contracts may fail to perform, leading to a total or partial default on valid claims. We extend models of such probabilistic insurance to allow for ambiguity in contract nonperformance risk, and derive formally that mean-preserving ambiguity reduces demand. The results of a field lab experiment are consistent with this logic. In particular, we find that a 10 percent…

In the digital era, the board of directors has an additional task: information governance. While storing data is no longer the problem, handling the data is. At the strategic management level, decisions have to be made as to the processes, organizational measures, and technologies required to actively manage the data throughout its life cycle in compliance with external and internal…

We develop a new methodological framework for the empirical study of legislative vote trading. Building on the concept of reciprocity in directed weighted networks, our method facilitates the measurement of vote trading on a large scale, while estimating the micro-structure of trades between individual legislators. In principle, it can be applied to a broad variety of voting data and…