Primary school enrollment rates are very low in francophone Africa. In order to enhance education supply, many countries have launched large teacher recruitment programmes in recent years, whereby teachers are no longer engaged on civil servant positions, but on the basis of (fixed term)...

This paper analyzes a recent ballot in which two virtually identical popular initiatives, both demanding a decrease in the legal age of retirement in Switzerland, led to differences in approval rates of nearly seven percentage points. Based on this unique natural experiment, the existence of...

We investigate the pricing performance of three convertible bond pricing models on the French convertible bond market using daily market prices. We examine a component model separating the convertible bond into a bond and option component, a method based on the Margrabe model for pricing...

This paper analyzes the impact of gender discrimination on individual life satisfaction using a cross-section of 66 countries. We employ measures of discrimination of women in the economy, in politics, and in society more generally. According to our results, discrimination in politics is...

Venture capital has become an important source of financing young entrepreneurial firms. Venture capital backed firms are often perceived as more innovative and as creating more value than others. Perhaps for this reason, policy makers are keen to create a good institutional framework to...

This paper provides theory and firm-level evidence on the incorporation decision of entrepreneurs in a model of corporate governance and taxation. The theory explains how the incorporation decision of entrepreneurs is driven by taxation (corporate and personal income taxes), corporate...

We use a model of self-centered inequality aversion suggested by Fehr and Schmidt (1999) to study voting on redistribution. We theoretically identify two classes of conditions when an empirically plausible amount of fairness preferences induces redistribution through referenda. We test the...

The notion that US stock prices follow a pattern that is synchronized with the rhythm of presidential elections has been a topic among financial investors for a long time. Academic work exists that supports this idea, quantifies the pattern, and has demonstrated its robustness over several...

We propose a tree-structured heterogeneous autoregressive (tree-HAR) process as a simple and parsimonious model for the estimation and prediction of tick-by-tick realized correlations. The model can account for different time and other relevant predictors' dependent regime shifts in the...

This paper presents two classes of tick-by-tick covariance estimators adapted to the case of rounding in the price time stamps to a frequency lower than the typical arrival rate of tick prices. We investigate, through Monte Carlo simulations, the behavior of such estimators under realistic...