infonet-economy

The current British Government's "Big Society" plan is based on the idea that granting more freedom to local communities and volunteers will compensate for a withdrawal of public agencies and spending. This idea is grounded on a widely held belief about the relationship between government and volunteering: a high degree of government intervention will cause a crowding…

The purpose of this research is to measure the performance of microinsurance programs using data envelopment analysis and to derive implications for the viable provision of microinsurance products. This is a worthwhile exercise given the significant limitations of the existing performance measures used in the microinsurance industry. A single and simple to interpret performance…

While there is a large literature documenting the profitability of momentum strategies, their implementation is afflicted with many difficulties. Most importantly, high turnover and costs to hold short positions, especially in small-cap stocks, result in high transaction costs. We restrict our investment universe to large-capitalized stocks included in the S&P 100 index. Moreover…

Bengt Johannisson received the International Award for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research in 2008. In this essay we present and evaluate his work over the last four decades in three of its dimensions: pioneering, provocative and participative. While his research interests and themes range widely, early on he resisted the individualization of entrepreneurship studies and…

We study a newly released data set of scanner prices for food products in a large Swiss online supermarket.
We find that average prices change about every two months, but when we exclude temporary sales,
prices are extremely sticky, changing on average once every three years. Non-sale price behavior is
broadly consistent with menu cost models of sticky prices. When…

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…

In this paper, we investigate the relation between firm-level corporate governance and firm value based on a large and previously unused dataset from Governance Metrics International (GMI) comprising 6,663 firm-year observations from 22 developed countries over the period from 2003 to 2007. Based on a set of 64 individual governance attributes we construct two alternative additive…