Publications des institutions partenaires

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Adverse selection in credit markets and regressive profit taxation

In many countries, taxes on businesses are less progressive than labor income taxes. This paper provides a justification for this pattern based on adverse selection that entrepreneurs face in credit markets. Individuals choose between becoming entrepreneurs or workers and differ in their skill in both of these occupations. I find that endogenous cross-subsidization in the credit...

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English / 01/07/2013

Optimal asset taxes in financial markets with aggregate uncertainty

This paper studies Pareto-optimal risk-sharing arrangements in a private information economy with aggregate uncertainty and ex ante heterogeneous agents. I show how to implement Pareto optima as equilibria when agents can trade claims to consumption contingent on aggregate shocks in financial markets. The first result is that if aggregate and idiosyncratic shocks are independent, the...

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English / 01/07/2013

Within-mother analysis of seasonal patterns in health at birth

A large literature describes relationships between month of birth, birth weight, and gestation. These relationships are hypothesized to reflect the causal impact of seasonal environmental factors. However, recent work casts doubt on this interpretation by showing that mothers with lower socioeconomic status are more likely to give birth in months that are associated with poorer birth...

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English / 01/07/2013

Strategic sustainability and financial performance: Exploring abnormal returns

The ongoing empirical debate about whether SRI is associated, if anything, with subpar or surpassing financial performance is characterized by a somewhat indistinct focus and the infeasibility of tapping the full potential of existing models. By indistinct focus, we mean an analysis based on an aggregation of a myriad of SRI factors that potentially affect a firm’s financial...

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English / 01/07/2013

Sustainability and risk in real estate investments: combining monte carlo simulation and dcf

This paper identifies the relative contribution of sustainability criteria to property value risk. We use a discounted cash flow (DCF) model to assess the effect of a given set of 42 sustainability sub-indicators on property value. The anticipated demand for each sustainability sub-indicator is described by four future states of nature. Their impact on costs and/or revenue is...

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English / 01/06/2013

Do Private Standards encourage or hinder trade and innovation?

Humankind shares a common interest in the safety of the products it uses and consumes and an increasing interest in the way the product has been produced. In a globalized world, private standards play a role in ensuring the safety and sustainability of products and production methods. The co-management of the public good ‘food safety’ by the public and the private sector is not new...

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English / 01/06/2013

The shareholder base and payout policy

We examine the relation between the shareholder base and payout policy. Consistent with the idea that the shareholder base is related to the cost of external financing we find that fi rms with small shareholder bases have lower payout levels and maintain higher cash holdings. We show that undertaking an open market repurchase results in a signi cant reduction in the size of the...

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English / 01/06/2013

Stock Liquidity and Corporate Cash Holdings: Feedback and the Cash as Ammunition Hypothesis

The paper contributes to the literature on corporate cash holdings by showing that there is a financial markets channel that affects corporations’ cash holdings. Leaning on the literature on stock price feedback to firm fundamentals, we advance the hypothesis that firms with more liquid stocks hold more cash, ceteris paribus, as ammunition to defend against negative cascades or...

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English / 01/06/2013

A geometric approach to mechanism design

We develop a novel geometric approach to mechanism design using an important result in convex analysis: the duality between a closed convex set and its support function. By deriving the support function for the set of feasible interim values we extend the wellknown Maskin-Riley-Matthews-Border conditions for reduced-form auctions to social choice environments. We next refine the...

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English / 01/06/2013

Attraction and cooperative behavior

Being good-looking seems to generate substantial benefits in many social interactions, making the "beauty premium" a not to be underrated economic factor. This paper investigates how physical attractiveness enables people to generate these benefits in the case of cooperation, using field data from a modified one-shot prisoner's dilemma played in a high-stakes...

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English / 01/06/2013

Identifying social norms using coordination games: Why does dictator game sharing vary?

We introduce an incentivized elicitation method for identifying social norms that uses simple coordination games. We demonstrate that concern for the norms we elicit and for money predict changes in behavior across several variants of the dictator game, including data from a novel experiment and from prior published laboratory studies, that are unaccounted for by most current...

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English / 01/06/2013

Income inequality of Swiss primary school teachers in the late 19th century

We examine the distribution of income across Swiss primary school teachers at the end of the 19th century. To assess the income differences we use a detailed data set on income of 14000 Swiss primary school teachers in 1881 and 1894/95. In addition, we have annually aggregated test scores from pedagogical examinations at recruitment, to test for the impact of inequality on conscripts...

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English / 01/06/2013

Non-homothetic preferences and industry directed technical change

Sectoral data features (i) changing relative expenditures of different sectors, (ii) non-constancy in relative prices and (iii) long-run trends in relative TFP growth rates across sectors. We provide a tractable theory of industry directed technical change, which is able to reconcile these findings. In doing so, this paper emphasizes the importance of directed technical change,...

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English / 01/06/2013

Does willful ignorance deflect punishment? – An experimental study

This paper studies whether people can avoid punishment by remaining willfully ignorant about possible negative consequences of their actions for others. We employ a laboratory experiment, using modified dictator games in which a dictator can remain willfully ignorant about the payoff consequences of his decision for a receiver. A third party can punish the dictator after observing...

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English / 01/06/2013

Estimating Dynamic Asymmetries in Demand at the Munich Oktoberfest

This study is the first to analyze economic time series of one of the world’s most preeminent traditional events, the most popular beer festival, and the largest regular fair in the world: Munich Oktoberfest. Since people from around the world attend this cultural festival as of the first decades of the 20th century, it represents a unique opportunity to analyze elasticities of...

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English / 01/06/2013

Nachhaltigkeit in Franken und Rappen

Bei Investitionsentscheidungen ist nicht nur die Rendite von Interesse, sondern auch das Risiko. Dies gilt bei Aktien- genauso wie bei Immobilienanlagen. Die Diskussion um Nachhaltigkeit ist u.a. geprägt vom Wunsch, Gutes zu tun. Aus Sicht von Unternehmen spielt dies im Zusammenhang mit Corporate Social Responsiblity eine wichtige Rolle. Aus Investitionssicht steht allerdings die...

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Deutsch / 29/05/2013

Long-run UIP holds even in the short run

The failure of uncovered interest rate parity to explain short-term interest rate movements is well documented. We show that short-term changes in long-term interest rates do help to explain short-term exchange rate movements. The relationship gets stronger over our sample period, as the liquidity of the exchange rate market increases. We also show that controlling for time-varying...

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English / 28/05/2013

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