infonet-economy

We study the economic effects of religious practices in the context of the observance of Ramadan fasting, one of the central tenets of Islam. To establish causality, we exploit variation in the length of daily fasting due to the interaction between the rotating Islamic calendar and a country’s latitude. We report two key, quantitatively meaningful results: (i) longer Ramadan fasting...

Contingent sovereign debt can create important welfare gains. Nonetheless, there is almost no issuance today. Using hand-collected archival data, we examine the first known case of large-scale use of state-contingent sovereign debt in history. Philip II of Spain entered into hundreds of contracts whose value and due date depended on verifiable, exogenous events such as the arrival of...

Trust in others’ honesty is a key component of the long-term performance of firms, industries, and even whole countries1, 2, 3, 4. However, in recent years, numerous scandals involving fraud have undermined confidence in the financial industry5, 6, 7. Contemporary commentators have attributed these scandals to the financial sector’s business culture8, 9, 10, but no scientific...

We find that stocks exhibiting high dispersion in analysts' earnings forecasts do not only underperform in the U.S. but also in some European countries. However, testing for the dispersion effect in many countries calls for adequate multiple testing controls. Under this paradigm it turns out that none of the naively derived dispersion effects proves to be a sustainable...

Entscheidungen des Managements können langfristig positive Auswirkungen auf das entsprechende Unternehmen haben oder der kurzfristigen Vergütungsoptimierung einzelner Entscheidungsträger dienen. Anhand eines Experiments sollen für verschiedene Szenarien die jeweiligen Präferenzen von Fachkräften bezüglich Ausmass und Technik der Erfolgssteuerung analysiert werden.

We explore empirically how capital inflows into the US and financial deregulation within the United States interacted in driving the run-up (and subsequent decline) in US housing prices over the period 1990-2010. To obtain an ex ante measure of financial liberalization, we focus on the history of interstate-banking deregulation during the 1980s, i.e. prior to the large net capital...

How large are optimal tariffs? What tariffs would prevail in a worldwide trade war? How costly would a breakdown of international trade policy cooperation be? And what is the scope for future multilateral trade negotiations? I address these and other questions using a unified framework which nests traditional, new trade, and political economy motives for protection. I find that...