There are striking differences between relative and absolute poverty rates in the European Union and the United States. In this paper, we apply the official poverty measurement methods of the United States (absolute) and the European Union (relative) to both regions. Official poverty rates...

This paper investigates to what extent Russian households have been able to protect their consumption against income shocks during the transition and whether the ability to smooth consumption is related to poverty. We use the cross-section and panel dimensions of the Russian Longitudinal...

The increasing availability of rich (panel) data provides many opportunities to test theories on consumption smoothing behaviour. At the same time, the informational requirements in terms of data and modelling are high and very context specific, thus requiring a filtering of essential...

This paper stresses the special role of multinational headquarters in corporate profit shifting strategies. Using a large panel of European firms, we show that multinational enterprises (MNEs) are reluctant to shift profits away from their headquarters even if these are located in high-tax...

This study analyzes the loss potential arising from investments into CDS for a sample of large U.S. and German mutual funds. Further, it investigates whether the comments funds make on CDS use in periodic fund reports are consistent with the disclosed CDS holdings. For several funds in the U.S.,...

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...

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, more than 3 million people with German ancestors immigrated to Germany under a special law granting immediate citizenship. Exploiting the exogenous allocation of ethnic German immigrants by German authorities across regions upon arrival, we find that...

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...

We show that the countries of the former Austro-Hungarian monarchy trade significantly more with one another in the aftermath of the collapse of the Iron Curtain than predicted by a standard gravity model. This trade surplus declines linearly and monotonically over time. We argue that these...