We give some basic empirical characteristics of the Oslo Stock Exchange in the period after 1980. We give statistics for number of firms, the occurences of IPO's, dividend payments, trading volume, and concentration. Returns for various market indices and portfolios are calculated and described....

We will show in this paper the role of inventories in explaining copper price volatility. Using a three factor model we derive a fundamental long-term value for copper. Second, we emphasis the significance of this fundamental long-term value by considering an agent based model approach in which...

This paper examines empirically whether democracies allocate fewer resources to the military than dictatorships do. It employs a panel of up to 112 countries over the period 1960-2000 to estimate a standard demand for military spending model. While papers on the determinants of military spending...

This paper examines the macroeconomic effects of unexpected, exogenous, simultaneous, temporary cuts to income tax rates in an economy when the government follows a balanced budget fiscal rule and keeps money supply constant, and private agents face constraints on the ability to finance...

The policy innovations that followed the recent Great Recession, such as unconventional monetary policies, prompted renewed interest in the question of how to measure the effectiveness of such policy interventions. To test policy effectiveness requires a model to construct a counterfactual for...

Costly information acquisition is introduced into a dynamic trading model of Glosten and Milgrom (1985). The market maker and some traders, called "value traders," value the asset at its fundamental value, which can be either high or low. The remaining traders, called "liquidity traders," have...

This paper investigates two elements of agency costs, namely the wealth-transfer and the value destruction problems, associated with the equity-conversion and writedown CoCo bonds. By focusing on the costs as those stemming from the deviation from absolute priority rule (DAPR), we derive the...

We analyze the incumbency effect on a candidate’s electoral prospects using a large data set on Italian municipal elections held from 1993 to 2011. We apply a non-parametric Sharp Regression Discontinuity Design that compares candidates who barely win an election to those who barely lose,...

This paper proposes tests of policy ineffectiveness in the context of macroeconometric rational expectations models. It is assumed that there is a policy intervention that takes the form of changes in the parameters of a policy rule, and that there are sufficient observations before and after...

Abstract In this paper we develop an index of the governmental support for PPP – a ‘PPP Governmental Support Index’ - which aims to measure the extent to which national governments provide an institutional framework that is either conducive or preventive for the introduction and diffusion...