Volkswirtschaft - Open Access LMU - Teil 03/03

Exchange rate exposure of firms diminishes when imported intermediates and exports are denominated in currencies that move together. Appreciations of the domestic currency, raising foreign currency export prices, then also reduce marginal costs, allowing firms to counter the increase in foreign prices. Using firm-level data from seven European countries I estimate a structural model showing how exchange rate pass-through into sales depends on intermediate imports and the co-movement of export and import related exchange rates. I find that operational hedging requires firms to intentionally choose export and import regions with comoving currencies. Analyzing the locational choice of firms confirms that the co-movement of currencies indeed appears to be taken into consideration

We study how foreign competition affects the composition of investments inside firms. A parsimonious model predicts that firms have an incentive to shift their investments towards more short-term assets when exposed to tougher competition. Using data on expenditures of listed US companies into various asset classes with different lifespans, we document empirical evidence that is consistent with this prediction. Over a fifteen year period between 1995 and 2009, the rise in import competition is associated with a reduction of the firm-specific asset lifespan by about 4.5% on average. We additionally exploit the Chinese WTO accession as an exogenous shock in firm expectations about future exposure to competition.

Hans Albert hat in einigen Arbeiten den apriorischen Charakter des „neoklassischen Denkstils” kritisiert und treffend als „Modellplatonismus” bezeichnet. Die apriorische Denkhaltung findet sich aber nicht nur in der von Albert kritisierten Neoklassik, sondern vielleicht noch ausgeprägterer bei vielen modellfeindlichen Theoretikern, wie etwa den Österreichern, den Ordnungstheoretikern, den Vertretern der „constitutional economics” oder manchen neueren Vertretern der sozialen Marktwirtschaft. Es erscheint mir deshalb sinnvoll, dem Begriff „Modellplatonismus” den Begriff „Ordnungsplatonismus” an die Seite zu stellen. Die folgenden Bemerkungen sollen diese Kritik etwas erläutern.

The lack of coordination in the resolution of multinational banks has led to demands for the increased centralization of resolution regimes. However, as this paper argues, the anticipation of resolution procedures affects the incentives of host countries to impose capital standards on their resident banks. Critically, it is shown that overall welfare can even be decreased by introducing a centralized resolution regime without fully centralizing capital requirements. As, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, only countries that are not part of a supranational resolution regime unilaterally and significantly increased the capital requirements for their largest resident banks, this paper can help to understand and study the heterogeneity of the observed regulatory approaches.

This paper examines how IT influences global sourcing decisions. It develops a theoretical model to study how IT determines the decisions of firms located in the high-wage North whether to offshore production to a low-wage country in the South. Offshoring to South however is subject to costly communication reflected by partially incomplete contracting. More sophisticated IT allows more efficient communication between the Northern headquarter and its Southern intermediate input supplier and alleviates contractual frictions. The model provides several predictions about the impact of IT on the organization of the global supply chain. Complex industries for which codifiability and verifiability of information is a much harder task, are more likely to source intermediate inputs in countries with more efficient IT infrastructure. Considering the mode of firm organization, more efficient IT infrastructure is expected to reduce the share of intra-firm trade in more complex industries. These predictions are examined and validated using disaggregated industry-level trade data. Most importantly, these findings are robust to controlling for well-known sources of comparative advantage and determinants of firm organization such as factor endowments, financial development and contract enforcement.

By introducing controlled-foreign-company (CFC) rules, the parent country of a multinational firm reserves the right to tax the income of the firm's foreign affiliates if the tax rate in the affiliate's host country is below a specified threshold. We identify the conditions under which binding CFC rules are part of the optimal tax mix when governments can set the statutory tax rate, a thin capitalization rule and the CFC rule. We also analyze the effects of economic and financial integration on the optimal policy mix. Our results correspond to the actual development of anti-avoidance rules in OECD countries.

We investigate with German data how the use of temporary agency work has helped establishments to manage the economic and financial crisis in 2008/09. We examine the (regular) workforce development, use of short-time work, and business performance of establishments that made differential use of temporary agency work prior to the crisis. Overall, our results suggest that establishments with a greater use of temporary agency work coped better with the sharp decline in demand and made less frequent use of government-sponsored short-time work schemes.

Evidence from studies in international relations, the politics of reform, collective action and price competition suggests that economic agents in social dilemma situations cooperate more to avoid losses than in the pursuit of gains. To test whether the prospect of losses can induce cooperation, we let experimental subjects play the traveler’s dilemma in the gain and loss domain. Subjects cooperate substantially more over losses. Our experimental design allows us to show that this treatment effect is best explained by reference-dependent risk preferences and referencedependent strategic sophistication. We discuss policy implications and relate our findings to other experimental games played in the loss domain.

Several countries have recently introduced national capital standards exceeding the internationally coordinated Basel III rules, thus suggesting a `race to the top' in capital standards. We study regulatory competition when banks are heterogeneous and give loans to firms that produce output in an integrated market. In this setting capital requirements change the pool quality of banks in each country and inflict negative externalities on neighboring jurisdictions by shifting risks to foreign taxpayers and by reducing total credit supply and output. Non-cooperatively set capital standards are higher than coordinated ones when governments care equally about bank profits, taxpayers, and consumers.

One possible determinant of overpricing on asset markets is a lack of self-control abilities of traders. Self-control is the individual capacity to override or inhibit undesired behavioral tendencies such as impulses and to refrain from acting on them. We implement the first experiment that is able to address a potential causal relationship between self-control abilities and systematic overpricing on financial markets by introducing an exogenous variation of self-control abilities. Our experimental conditions seek to detect some of the channels through which individual self-control problems could transmit into irrational exuberance on the aggregate level. We observe a strong effect of inhibited self-control abilities on market overpricing. Our findings are furthermore robust to reducing self-control abilities only for a moderate share of traders in a market. Low self-control traders engage in more speculative behavior early on, but because others imitate their trading patterns, they do not end up earning less and are not driven out of the market.

This paper explores how reduced self-control affects individual investment behavior in two laboratory tasks. For this purpose, I exogenously reduce subjects’ self-control using a well-established psychological treatment. In each task, I find no significant main treatment effect, but secondary effects consistent with findings on self-control from other studies and self-control’s potential relevance in financial markets. In experiment 1, I find no significant change in the disposition effect following the manipulation. However, treated participants trade fewer different shares per round. In experiment 2, I look at the effect of self-control on myopic loss aversion by implementing a 2×2 design by varying investment horizon and self-control in a repeated lottery environment. Average behavior suggests that reduced self-control increases framing effects, but I cannot reject the null hypothesis of equal investment levels between the self-control treatments within each investment frame. Analyzing the dynamics of decision making in more detail, self-control depleted participants in the narrow frame reduce their investment levels on average over time which seems to be driven by more intense reactions to investment experiences.

This is an electronic reprint of a review of the book "Cultures Merging: A Historical and Economic Critique of Culture" by Eric L. Jones, Princeton: Princeton University Press that appeared in the Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 2007, vol. 163, issue 3, pages 526-529, URL url{http://www.jstor.org/stable/40752660}.

This is an electronic reprint of the second chapter of the book "On Custom in the Economy" by Ekkehart Schlicht that has been published in 1998 by the Clarendon Press, Oxford. The chapter focusses on the behavioral entailments of concluding a contract.

Theoretical and empirical work on export dynamics has generally assumed constant marginal production cost and therefore ignored domestic product market conditions. However, recent studies have documented a negative correlation between firms' do- mestic and export sales growth, suggesting that firms can be capacity constrained in the short run and face increasing marginal production cost. This paper develops and estimates a dynamic model of export behavior incorporating short-term capacity con- straints and endogenous capital investment. Consistent with the empirical evidence, the model features firms' sales substitutions across markets in the short term, and generates time-varying transition paths of firm responses through firms' capital adjust- ments over time. The model is fit to a panel of plant-level data for Colombian manufacturing indus- tries and used to simulate how firm responses transition following an exchange-rate devaluation. The results indicate that incorporating capital adjustment costs is quan- titatively important, as shown by the length of the transition period, and the difference between the short-run and long-run exchange rate elasticity of exports. Firms' expeca- tion on the permanence of the policy changes also matters.

Microcredit institutions typically apply rigid and fixed repayment schedules when disbursing loans in order to reduce transaction costs, simplify procedures, and inculcate fiscal discipline for better repayment behavior. Microcredit clients, however, often have neither smooth income nor singular moments in which to make lumpy investments throughout the year. This mismatch generates a cash flow disconnect and, given the presumed liquidity constraints of the typical microcredit client, a potential welfare loss. Using data from a randomized evaluation with dairy farmers in rural India, we test the impact of flexible microcredit repayment schedules relative to "normal" inflexible, fixed repayment schedules. Although we are only able to track those who borrow, which introduces potential selection effects, we find amongst those in flexible lending groups some evidence for higher ability to absorb shocks and higher income, which seems to be driven by limited improvements in investment and higher production from milk. On the cost-side, defaults do increase for the lender. Towards the end of the study, the microcredit market encountered crisis, with mass defaults, thus it is hard to generalize with respect to the default results. We conclude with caution, that we have shown suggestive evidence that a more flexible product design, one tailored to the needs of a dairy farmer, may be welfare enhancing for the dairy farmer. Further work is needed to both validate these results, and explore how to balance any trade-off with default.

While trust and trustworthiness provide a fundamental foundation for human relationships, little is known about how trusting and trustworthy behavior in social dilemmas is related to age and aging. A few papers use data from surveys such as the World Values Survey to address a potential connection between trust and age. In this chapter, we will mainly focus on trusting and trustworthy behavior elicited with the use of the seminal trust game (Berg et al., 1995) and with games implementing a similar incentivized interaction structure. The results suggest that trust and trustworthiness increase with young age until adolescence. Trustworthiness reaches the level of adults at an earlier age (at around 15-16 years of age) than trusting behavior (around adulthood). Survey results differ from incentivized experiments when it comes to a potential development of trust in adulthood. The former indicate a steady rise in trust levels at a small rate when becoming older, whereas the latter show a decline, starting at an age of about 60 years.

This paper studies the relationship between social class, educational attainment, and social mobility. While educational expansion has been shown to increase educational attainment and social mobility in contemporary countries, the 19th century has received little attention. The German state of Bavaria experienced an enormous expansion of secondary education in the course of the 19th century, also due to the introduction of modern secondary education (Gewerbeschule). In this context, it is asked whether educational expansion (1) led to changes in the association between social class and educational attainment, and especially so after the introduction of the Gewerbeschule; (2) weakened the link between social class of origin (father’s occupation) and class of destination (son’s occupation) and thereby increased social mobility? Employing a unique dataset based on annual school reports of 21 Bavarian cities covering the 19th century, the analysis of occupational background information on students by the use of HISCO/HISCLASS reveals that introduction of the Gewerbeschule increased self-selection of the upper class into traditional and the middle class into modern education. Even though educational expansion did not increase participation of lower social classes, the prospect of social mobility for underprivileged classes was high especially in the Gymnasium.

Although understanding preferences for privacy is of great importance to economists, businesses and politicians little is known about the factors that shape the individual willingness to share personal data. This article provides three experimental studies with a total of 470 participants that help characterizing individual preferences for sharing personal data varying the characteristics of potential recipients. We find that participants’ willingness to share personal data with anonymous recipients decreases with the number of recipients. However, social distance to the recipients and the extent of personal data a single recipient receives do not decrease the willingness to share personal data. Further, we provide a methodological insight by showing that verification of personal data is essential when eliciting privacy preferences.

In my view, globalization is a process that has taken place episodically since approximately the beginning of the 16th century. Previously, there were a number of attemps at globalization, which however failed to attain the precondition of regular commercial and communicative relationships among the parts of the globe; nor did they lead to the kind of stable multilateral interdependence that later took place (Osterhamme/Petersson). In chronologically sequenced chapters, I briefly present the driving forces and the consequences of globalization. In the respective chapters, Chinas highly variegated role is explored: from the first attempt at globalization in the 14/15 centuries, which was of an expansive nature; in the first push at globalization from 1500, China was increasingly in retreat; during the surge of globalization in the 19th century, China was an almost insignificant push‐toy of the European powers; and in the current situation China may be characterized as a tardive beginner, yet then advancing to a leadership role. In concluding I undertake a framework for understanding the so‐called "Chinese Economic Miracle," for which the German term Wirtschaftswunder may readily be substituted. The highly differential significance of China for these various phases of globalization is an arresting example for my hypothesis that globalization may not unreasonably be regarded as a market‐driven and invariably politically‐fashioned process.

How do alternative job opportunities affect teacher quality? We provide the first causal evidence on this question by exploiting business cycle conditions at career start as a source of exogenous variation in the outside options of potential teachers. Unlike prior research, we directly assess teacher quality with value-added measures of impacts on student test scores, using administrative data on 33,000 teachers in Florida public schools. Consistent with a Roy model of occupational choice, teachers entering the profession during recessions are significantly more effective in raising student test scores. Results are supported by placebo tests and not driven by differential attrition.

This note proposes a growth model that is derived from the standard Solow growth model by replacing the neoclassical production function with Kaldor’s technical progress function while maintaining a marginalist theory of factor prices in the spirit suggested by von Weizsäcker (1966, 1966b). The hybrid model so obtained accounts for balanced growth in a way that appears less arbitrary than the Solow model, especially because it directly accounts for Harrod neutral technical change, without any need for further assumptions.

We investigate whether risk, time, environmental, and social preferences affect single family homeowners’ investments in energy efficient renovations and energy quality of their house using established experimental measures and questionnaires. We find that homeowners who report to be more risk taking are more likely to have renovated their house. Pro-environmental and future-oriented renovators, i.e. renovators with lower discount factors, live in homes with higher energy efficiency. Controlling for the energy efficiency of houses, we further find that energy consumption as measured by heating and energy costs are lower for future-oriented and pro-environmental individuals. Social preferences measured in a dictator and a generosity game play a mixed role for investments in energy efficiency and energy consumption.

Do international trade and technological change influence how firms create incentives for human capital? I present a model that incorporates agency problems into a framework with firm heterogeneity and human capital. My model indicates that trade liberalizations and skill-biased technological change alter the way how the largest firms in an economy incentivize their managers. Increases in managerial reservation wages lead to a reduction in corporate governance investments and a rise in performance compensation since monitoring managers becomes less efficient. Using data on CEO compensation and entrenchment opportunities in public industrial firms in the U.S., I document strong empirical regularities in support of the model predictions. Firms allow for more managerial entrenchment and offer larger CEO compensation when their industries become more open to trade or when production becomes more I.T. intensive.

We introduce credit frictions motivated by moral hazard in a general equilibrium model of international trade with two dimensions of heterogeneity and endogenous investments. Firms’ competitiveness consists of capabilities to conduct process and quality innovations at low costs, whereas investment outlays have to be financed by external capital. We show that the scope for vertical product differentiation in a sector determines how credit tightening affects investment and price setting. Consistent with recent empirical evidence, our model rationalizes positive as well as negative correlations of firm-level FOB prices with financial frictions and variable trade costs. Faced with an increase in the borrowing rate, producers reduce both types of innovation resulting in opposing effects on marginal production costs and prices. In general equilibrium, financial frictions intensify quality-based (cost-based) sorting of firms if the scope for vertical product differentiation is high (low). Consequently, credit tightening leads to firm exit, increased innovation activity among existing suppliers, and welfare losses that are larger in sectors with low investment intensity.

μCap (muCap) is a software package (citeware) for economic experiments enabling experimenters to analyze emotional states of subjects using z-Tree and FaceReader™. μCap is able to create videos of subjects on client computers based on stimuli shown on screen and restrict recording material to relevant time frames. Another feature of μCap is the creation of time stamps in csv format at prespecified screens (or at prespecified points in time) during the experiment, measured on the client computer. The software makes it possible to import these markers into FaceReader™ easily. Until recently, connecting z-Tree and FaceReader™ was only possible using workarounds or by undertaking many successive actions manually. μCap is the first program that significantly simplifies this process with the additional benefit of extremely high precision. This paper describes the usage, underlying principles as well as advantages and limitations of μCap. Furthermore, we give a brief outlook of how μCap can be beneficial in other contexts.

This paper analyses long-term effects of forced WWII migration on educational outcomes. Specifically Sudeten German expellees in post-war Bavaria coming from highly industrialized Sudetenland (Czechoslovakia) had strong preferences for higher secondary schooling, especially in form of a practical, business-related, and general education school. As a result they became actively engaged in the development of post-war middle track education (Realschule, Fachschule). Employing county-level data on student numbers and graduates of secondary education, empirical analysis including ordinary least squares, instrumental variable, and differences-in-differences models reveals that counties housing a higher share of Sudeten Germans after the war are significantly associated with higher educational development some 20 years later. An increase in the share of Sudeten Germans by 1 percentage point increases the share of children (graduates) in middle track education by at least 0.8 (0.1) percentage points, respectively. Calculations suggest that these effects are not mechanically caused by Sudeten Germans and their children demanding education, but are the actual result of educational spillovers to the local population.

We show that socio-economic status (SES) is a powerful predictor of many facets of a child's personality. The facets of personality we investigate encompass time preferences, risk preferences, and altruism, as well as crystallized and fluid IQ. We measure a family's SES by the mother's and father's average years of education and household income. Our results show that children from families with higher SES are more patient, tend to be more altruistic and less likely to be risk seeking, and score higher on IQ tests. We also discuss potential pathways through which SES could affect the formation of a child's personality by documenting that many dimensions of a child's environment differ systematically by SES: parenting style, quantity and quality of time parents spend with their children, the mother's IQ and economic preferences, a child's initial conditions at birth, and family structure. Finally, we use panel data to show that the relationship between SES and personality is fairly stable over time at age 7 to 10. Personality profiles that vary systematically with SES might offer an explanation for social immobility.

I study the optimal audit mechanism when the principal cannot commit to an audit strategy. Invoking a relevation principle, the agent reports her type to a mediator whi assigns contracts and recommends the principla whether to audit. For each reported type the mediator randomizes over a base-contract and the audit contract, accompanied by a recommendation to audit. For large penalties the optimal mechanism uses strictly more contracts than types and cannot be implemented via offering a menu of contracts. The analysis provides a proper benchmark for studying auditing under limited commitment and sheds new light on the usefulness of mediation in contracting and on the design of optimal mechanisms.

We study monetary policy at the ZLB in a traceable three-period model, in which price-level targeting emerges endogenously in the welfare function. We characterize optimal price-level forward guidance under discretion and commitment. Potentially non-monotonic discretionary welfare losses are lowest with perfectly flexible prices. Price-level targeting introduces a new constraint on optimal forward guidance that restricts the credible amount of overshooting. With this constraint, the zero lower bound may be binding even after the shock has abated. We characterize conditions when the commitment to hold nominal rates at zero for an extended period is optimal. Finally, we introduce government spending and show that under persistently low policy rates optimal government spending becomes more front-loaded, while procyclical austerity fares worse than discretionary government spending.

An extensive literature has studied ambiguity aversion in economic decision making, and how ambiguity aversion can account for empirically observed violations of expected utility-based theories. Almost all relevant applied models presume a general dislike of ambiguity. In this paper, we provide a systematic experimental assessment of ambiguity attitudes in different likelihood ranges and in the gain domain, the loss Domain and with mixed outcomes. We draw on a unified framework with more than 500 participants and find that ambiguity aversion is the exception, not the rule. We replicate the usual finding of ambiguity aversion for moderate likelihood gains. However, when introducing losses or lower likelihoods, we observe either ambiguity neutrality or even ambiguity seeking behavior. Our results are robust to different elicitation procedures.

Thu, 1 Jan 2015 12:00:00 +0100 http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ifodic:v:13:y:2015:i:2:p:57-62 https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/27299/1/dice-report-2015-2-haufler-etal-tax-policy-june.pdf Langenmayr, Dominika; Haufler, Andreas ddc:330, Seminar für Wirtschaftspolitik, Lehrstühle, Volkswirtschaft

In the absence of financial frictions, the purpose of thin capitalization rules is to limit multinational firms’ possibilities of engaging in tax planning via debt shifting. This paper analyzes the effects of thin capitalization rules in the case where firms have limited access to external funding. First, we show that a host country allows positive internal interest deductions if its financial development is sufficiently low. This amount increases when the financial development of the host country worsens. Then we ask which of the two most common thin capitalization rules used in practice is better suited to maximizing welfare of the host country. We show that welfare under a safe haven rule is higher than under an earnings stripping rule if firms are not able to manipulate transfer prices. Welfare, however, can be higher under an earnings stripping rule if firms are able to manipulate transfer prices. The analysis provides an explanation for why countries differ in the strictness and in the type of thin capitalization rule.

Public goods provision often involves groups of contributors repeatedly interacting with administrators who can extract rents from the pool of contributions. We suggest a novel identification approach that exploits the sequential ordering of decisions in a panel vector autoregressive model to study social interactions in the laboratory. Despite rent extraction, contributors and administrators establish a stable interaction with cooperation matching the level from a comparable Public Goods Game. In the short run, temporary changes in behavior trigger substantial behavioral multiplier effects. We demonstrate that cooperation breeds trustworthiness and vice versa and that one-time disruptions are particularly damaging in settings with a lack of cooperative attitudes and trust.

I develop an empirical framework to disentangle different sources of consumer inertia in the US wireless industry. The use of a detailed data set allows me to identify preference heterogeneity from consumer type-specific market shares and switching costs from churn rates. Identification of a localized network effect comes from comparing the dynamics of distinct local markets. The central condition for identification is that neither the characteristics defining consumer heterogeneity nor the characteristics defining reference groups are a (weak) subset of the other. Being able to separate switching costs and network effects is important as both can lead to inefficient consumer inertia, but depending on its sources policy implications may be very different. Estimates of switching costs range from US-$ 316 to US-$ 630. The willingness to pay for a 20%-point increase in an operator’s market share is on average US-$ 22 per month. My counterfactuals illustrate that both effects are important determinants of consumers’ price elasticities potentially translating into market power that helps large carriers in defending their dominant position.

This paper investigates the economic returns to language skills and bilingualism. The analysis is staged in Kazakhstan, a multi-ethnic country with complex ethnic settlement patterns that has switched its official state language from Russian to Kazakh. Using two newly assembled data sets, we find negative returns to speaking Kazakh and a negative effect of bilingualism on earnings while Russian was the official state language in the 1990s. Surprisingly, the Kazakh language continues to yield a negative wage premium 13 years after it has been made official state language. While we do neither find evidence for an ethnically segmented labor market nor for reverse causality, the low economic value of the Kazakh language can be explained by the comparatively poor quality of schools with Kazakh as language of instruction. Based on PISA data, we illustrate that scholastic achievements are substantially lower for pupils taught in Kazakh, despite the official support for the titular language. Our results suggest that switching the official state language without appropriate investments in school resources is unlikely to cure the economic disadvantage of a previously marginalized language.

We incorporate trade in tasks à la Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) into a small open economy version of the theory of firm organization of Marin and Verdier (2012) to examine how offshoring affects the way firms organize. We show that the offshoring of production tasks leads firms to reorganize with a more decentralized management, improving the competitiveness of the offshoring firms. We show further that the offshoring of managerial tasks relaxes the constraint on managers but toughens competition, and thus has an ambiguous impact on the level of decentralized management and CEO wages of the offshoring firms. In sufficiently open economies, however, managerial offshoring unambiguously leads to more decentralized management and to larger CEO wages. We test the predictions of the model based on original firm level data we designed and collected of 660 Austrian and German multinational firms with 2200 subsidiaries in Eastern Europe. We find that offshoring firms are 33.4% more decentralized than non-offshoring firms. We find further that the average fraction of managers offshored reduces the level of decentralized management by 3.1%, but increases the level of decentralized management by 4% in industries with a level of openness above the 25th percentile of the openness distribution. Lastly, we find that one additional offshored manager lowers CEO wages relative to workers by 4.9%.

This paper studies how society votes on the payroll taxes of a basic income and a social health insurance scheme. Individuals differ along the two most important dimensions when it comes to the design of the two welfare schemes, namely, income and risk. Even though the introduction of a basic income scheme opens up the possibility for additional redistribution, it also crowds out social health insurance. We show that when both welfare schemes are open for debate, the political equilibrium is such that only the basic income scheme prevails. At the constitutional stage we determine which welfare scheme society agrees to implement behind the veil of ignorance and with a Rawlsian objective. Since social health insurance not only redistributes income from rich to poor but also from low-risk to high-risk agents, the doubly disadvantaged in society – low-income and high-risk agents – may lose out in the political process when a basic income scheme is in place. Depending on the amount of health care expenditure and the inequalities in income and risk, it may well be that a society will find it optimal to set up an institutional framework for a social health insurance scheme only.

This study provides a comprehensive overview of the use of credit default swaps by U.S. corporate bond funds and analyzes in detail whether certain characteristics of managers, in addition to the fundamentals of a fund, determine how their use these credit derivatives. Results suggest that a manager’s education, age, experience, and skill are positively correlated with a fund’s CDS holdings. In particular, managers holding a master’s degree or educated at prestigious universities prefer using CDS. However, funds with older, more experienced managers or these keeping higher assets under their management are more likely to take on credit risk via selling CDS protection. Younger managers or managers that were educated at prestigious universities rather tend to buy CDS protection possibly due to differing concerns about their careers. If considering the Heckman correction for self-selection of funds into CDS use, the aforementioned findings remain stable.

Many countries apply lower fines to tax evading individuals when they voluntarily disclose the tax evasion they committed. I model such voluntary disclosure mechanisms theoretically and show that while such mechanisms increase the incentive to evade taxes, they nevertheless increase tax revenues net of administrative costs. I then test the effects of voluntary disclosure in two separate empirical analyses. First, I confirm that voluntary disclosure mechanisms increase tax evasion, using the introduction of the 2009 offshore voluntary disclosure program in the U.S. for identification. Second, I quantify the tax revenues of voluntary disclosures by considering how some state-level governments in Germany bought whistle-blower data from foreign bank employees, thereby increasing the detection probability and the usage of voluntary disclosures.

We show that political booms, measured by the rise in governments’ popularity, predict financial crises above and beyond other better-known early warning indicators, such as credit booms. This predictive power, however, only holds in emerging economies. We show that governments in emerging economies are more concerned about their reputation and tend to ride the short-term popularity benefits of weak credit booms rather than implementing politically costly corrective policies that would help prevent potential crises. We provide evidence of the relevance of this reputation mechanism.

Do new school types focusing on practical and business-related knowledge lead to increased economic performance? To analyze this question, this paper examines the introduction of two types of modern secondary education, the Gewerbeschule and its successor, the Realschule, in nineteenth-century Bavaria. Since opening of these schools is arguably endogenous – as it were mainly the prosperous, big cities that opened one – the estimated treatment effect capturing the economic influence of the Gewerbeschule/Realschule will lead to biased results. To alleviate this bias, I adopt propensity score matching to compare relatively alike counties with and without these schools. Using historical county-level data on business formations, tax revenues, employment structure, and patent holdings, OLS regression analysis shows that the opening of a modern secondary school is in general positively associated with economic performance several years later.

We investigate two determinants of the price sensitivity of health plan demand: the size of the choice set and the salience of premium differences. Using variation in both features in the German Social Health Insurance (SHI) and information on health plan switches of retirees in the German Socio Economic Panel, augmented with information on individuals’ choice sets we find that retirees react less to potential savings from switching when they have more plans to choose from and when differences between premiums are less salient. Simplifying choices could save consumers money and improve the functioning of the health insurance market.

In this paper, we incorporate offshoring of labor-intensive goods in a model with multi-product firms, and explore its implications in partial and general oligopolistic equilibrium. We identify important aspects of this phenomenon and argue that improvements in offshoring opportunities can affect the geographic organization of a firm and its product range. Multi-product firms internalize supply linkages (flexible manufacturing) and demand linkages (cannibalization effect). In partial equilibrium, we find that more products are produced offshore on a larger scale and firms expand their product range with better prospects for offshoring. We identify the cannibalization effect as an important transmission mechanism within multi-product firms and show that the latter effect hits domestic labor demand in addition to the well-known relocation effect. Interestingly in general equilibrium these effects lead to adjustments in domestic factor prices and may cause a partial re-relocation of product lines.

This paper studies the innovation strategies of multi-product firms in industries with different scope for product differentiation. In a simple model of multi-product firms, we show that returns to product versus process innovation are industry-specific. Demand and cost linkages induce a natural distinction between the returns to product and process innovation. In highly differentiated industries, the cannibalization effect is lower and, therefore, firms invest more in product innovation. In homogeneous industries, firms internalize intra-firm spillover effects and invest more in process innovation. We test the predictions from the model using Brazilian firm-level data, with information on investment efforts over time. Following a major exchange rate devaluation, firms have better access to foreign markets and exploit economies of scale in innovation. However, detailed information on product and process innovation allows us to evaluate differential effects across industries. We con.rm the predictions from the theoretical model and show that the type of innovation depends on the industry scope for differentiation.

In this paper, I investigate welfare gains associated with trade induced intra-firm adjustments of multi-product firms. To disentangle the welfare gains, I split up the R&D portfolio of a multi-product firm into three different channels: i) product innovation, ii) investments in the degree of product differentiation, and iii) process innovation. Trade integration enables firms to exploit economies of scale as innovation requires upfront development costs and encourages firms to spend more on R&D. I derive the indirect utility function and show that consumers bene.t from this behavior through a larger product range (love of variety) which is also more differentiated (love of diversity). Furthermore, a larger market is associated with technology upgrading. The resulting cost savings are passed on to consumers, leading to welfare gains from lower prices.

In this paper, we evaluate firm-, industry- and country-specific factors determining a firm's capital structure. The empirical validity of several capital structure theories has been ambiguous so far. We shed light on the main drivers of leverage and depict differences in industry and country characteristics. Using a short panel data set with a large cross-section, we are able to show that firm size, industry leverage, industry growth and tax shield positively affect leverage ratios, while profitability and liquidity have negative impacts. Moreover, our model is an improvement over Rajan and Zingales' (1995) four-factor core model in terms of explaining data variation. The results are robust against different panel estimators, decompositions and over time.

In this paper, I evaluate the impact of innovative activity of financial agents on their fragility in a competitive framework. There exist a vast array of concerns about the interconnection of financial innovations, financial distress of firms and financial crises provided by theoretical arguments. I build on these and assess empirically the causal link between a financial agents' innovativeness and stability. Using a unique data set on financial innovations in the USA between 1990 and 2002, I show that a larger degree of innovation negatively (positively) affects firm stability (fragility) after controlling for the underlying firm characteristics. The results are robust against different modifications of innovation measures and against different fragility parameters indicating profitability, activity risk and risk of insolvency.

I experimentally examine whether feedback about others' choices provides an anchor for decision-making under ambiguity. In a between-subjects design I vary whether subjects learn choices made individually by a "peer" in a first part when facing the same task a second time, and whether prospects are defined over gains or losses. My key findings are that the relative ambiguity attitude (compared to the peer's) significantly matters for shifts in individual attitudes, and that dynamics considerably differ between gain and loss domains. For gains, learning to be comparably ambiguity averse increases the likelihood for such shifts, relative to the individual condition; for losses, this likelihood decreases only if peers learn to exhibit exactly the same attitude. Further, I observe imitative shifts towards the peer's attitude in the gain domain, but only towards neutrality in the loss domain. Shifts towards neutrality for losses also appear significant without social anchor suggesting that ambiguity seeking might not be particularly robust. Moreover, cognitive ability positively correlates to shifts towards neutrality in the gain domain, but has no impact in the loss domain.

Using a time-varying parameter vector autoregression (TVP-VAR) with a new sign restriction framework, we study the changing effectiveness of the Bank of Japan's Quantitative Easing policies over time. We analyse the Zero-Interest Rate Policy from 1999 to 2000, the Quantitative Easing Policy from 2001 to 2006, and most recently the ‘Abenomics' monetary policy easing strategy. Our results indicate that there are important differences concerning the effects of Quantitative Easing over time. We find a stronger and longer lasting positive influence of QE shocks on real GDP and CPI especially since 2013. This might reflect the influence of the ‘Abenomics' program.

This paper develops a two-sector, two-factor trade model with labor market frictions in which workers search for a job also when they are employed. On the job search (OJS) is a key ingredient to explain the response to trade liberalization of sectoral employment, unemployment and wage inequality. OJS generates wage dispersion and it leads to a reallocation of workers from less productive firms that pay lower wages to more productive ones. Following a trade liberalization the traditional selection effects are more severe than without OJS and the tradable sector experiences a loss of employment, while the opposite is true for the non tradable sector. Starting from autarky, the opening to trade has a positive effect on employment but it increases wage inequality. For an already open economy, a further increase of trade openness can, however, lead to an increase of unemployment. The dynamics of labor market variables is obtained in closed form. The model predicts overshooting at the time of implementation of a trade liberalization, then the paths of adjustment follow a stable transitional dynamics.

According to several psychological and economic studies, non-binding communication can be an effective tool to increase trust and enhance cooperation. This paper focuses on reasons why people stick to a given promise and analyzes to what extent image concerns of being perceived as a promise breaker play a role. In a controlled laboratory experiment, we vary the ex post observability of the promising party's action in order to test for social image concerns. We observe that slightly more promises are kept if the action is revealed than if it is not, yet the difference is not significant. However, a variation in the selection of pre-defined messages across treatments delivers another interesting finding. While most of the promises are kept, statements of intent tend to be broken.