infonet-economy

We examine how bank funding and securitization activity affect the currency denomination of business loans. We analyze a unique dataset that for more than hundred thousand loans granted by one Bulgarian bank to over sixty thousand different firms in the period 2003-2007 includes information on the requested and granted currency of the loans. Our findings confirm the conjecture that…

This paper investigates, how the 2007-08 financial crisis has affected the risk perceptions of institutional bond investors. Using a methodology novel to the empirical finance literature, we quantify the impact that changes in risk perception have had on bond spreads over the course of the crisis. The relative contribution of the change in risk perceptions can be measured by…

Should capital cost calculations be based on a global or local market benchmark? The December 2000 redefinition of the Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) global equity index was a natural experiment addressing this question. It is argued that this event triggered a portfolio shift (by index funds) large enough to affect the residual asset supplies constituting the global and…

We investigate the impact of wage comparisons for worker productivity. We present three studies which all use three-person gift-exchange experiments. Consistent with Akerlof and Yellen's (1990) fair wage-effort hypothesis we find that disadvantageous wage discrimination leads to lower efforts while advantageous wage discrimination does not increase efforts on average. Two…

Am 1. Februar 1953 wurden grosse Teile der Niederlande von einer Sturmflut heimgesucht. Etwa 2000 Menschen starben und die Wirtschaftsleistung grosser Landstriche wurde weitgehend zerstört. Ausgelöst wurde die Flutkatastrophe durch unglückliche klimatische Umstände und den schlechten Zustand vieler Deiche im Mündungsgebiet der drei Flüsse Rhein, Maas und Schelde.

We estimate the effects of active labour market policies (ALMP) on subsequent employment by nonparametric instrumental variables and matching estimators. Very informative administrative Swiss data with detailed regional information are combined with exogenous regional variation in programme participation probabilities, which generate an instrument within well-defined local labour…

Does the cultural background influence the success with which genetically unrelated individuals cooperate in social dilemma situations? In this paper, we provide an answer by analysing the data of Herrmann et al. (2008a), who studied cooperation and punishment in 16 subject pools from six different world cultures (as classified by Inglehart & Baker (2000)). We use analysis of…

In many countries, caseworkers in a public employment office have the dual roles of counselling and monitoring unemployed persons. These roles often conflict with each other leading to important caseworker heterogeneity: Some consider providing services to their clients and satisfying their demands as their primary task. Others may however pursue their strategies even against the…