infonet-economy

This paper examines whether investors receive compensation for holding stocks with a strong sensitivity to extreme market downturns in a sample covering forty countries. Worldwide, stocks with strong crash sensitivity deliver average returns of more than 7% p.a. higher than stocks with weak crash sensitivity. The effect is robust across geographical subsamples and is not explained by…

We introduce non-homothetic preferences into an R&D based growth model to study how demand forces shape the impact of inequality on innovation and growth. Inequality affects the incentive to innovate via a price effect and a market size effect. When innovators have a large productivity advantage over traditional producers a higher extent of inequality tends to increase innovators…

The study "Company Succession in Practice – The Challenge of Generation Change" is based on a survey of more than 1,300 Swiss SMEs. Twenty percent of the entrepreneurs who took part are planning to hand their company over within the next five years. In other words, an estimated 70,000-80,000 businesses in Switzerland are facing generation change between now and 2021.…

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.…