infonet-economy

Using state-of-the-art frontier efficiency methodologies, we study the efficiency and productivity of Swiss insurance companies in the life, property/casualty, and reinsurance sectors from 1997-2013. In this context, we provide the first empirical analysis of internationalization strategies of insurance companies, a topic of high interest in the business and economics literature, but…

When facing complex ethical problems, assigning responsibility is a difficult undertaking with far-reaching consequences. Chapter 3 by Thomas Beschorner and Martin Kolmar addresses this foundational issue by arguing for a multilevel approach that rejects this either/or thinking of moral actions versus institutions. It proposes using an extended transaction cost approach (inspired by…

Participation in intensive training programs for the unemployed in Germany is allocated by awarding training vouchers. Using rich administrative data for all vouchers and actual program participation,
the authors provide first estimates of the short-run and long-run employment and earnings effects of receiving a training voucher award based on a selection-on-observables…

Focusing on the art market, where auction houses act as brokers between art sellers and buyers, we investigate whether more experienced brokers achieve better performance as information providers. We use a unique data set of auctions of Italian paintings in various houses around the world, and we measure experience as the number of times an auctioneer has auctioned the artworks of a…

We provide the first comprehensive theoretical model for money markets encompassing unsecured and secured funding, asset markets, and central bank policy. In our model, leveraged banks invest in assets and raise short-term funds by borrowing in the unsecured and secured money markets. We derive how funding liquidity across money markets is related, explain how a shock to asset values…

We investigate whether investor reactions to the announcement of a new outside director appointment significantly depend upon the director's experience in the appointing firm's industry. Our sample includes 688 outside director appointments to boards of S&P 500 companies from 2005 to 2010. We find significantly higher announcement returns upon appointments of…

A central matter of dispute in the internationalization literature is the existence and shape of a systematic relationship between the degree of internationalization and firm performance (I-P relationship). Considering the global insurance industry, we show that the I-P relationship depends on the industry's idiosyncrasies and on the geographical scope of internationalization.…

This article attempts to show that from 12 December 2016, WTO Members can no longer use the analogue country or similar methodologies as the basis for normal value calculations in anti-dumping proceedings targeting China and should rather use Chinese domestic prices or costs. However, contrary to what some would like decision-makers to believe, this does not mean that the EU or other…