In the German Empire, corporations almost always paid a dividend to their shareholders. Dividends have been cut or increased in line with the development of profits. We demonstrate that the target dividend and the average dividend tended to be nearly the same. If the dividend paid deviated from...

Consumer consent regulation is the cornerstone of modern data privacy regulation such as the European GDPR and the Californian CCPA. By ensuring that consumers can reject any harmful data collection, the regulation seems an effective tool for protecting consumers against price discrimination. By...

How shall publicly provided excludable goods be financed - by general taxation or user fees? The general conclusion of the existing literature is that exclusive tax financing is neither efficient nor desirable under widely shared distributive goals. A striking example is childcare because here...

Motivated by the recent increase in bank mergers, this paper examines the performance of German cooperative banks that merged between 2014 and 2019. We are particularly interested in whether elevated merger rates are due to bank inefficiencies or to challenging policy measures such as...

Given the renewed scholarly interest in the crafts, this paper explores the nuances of crafts entrepreneurship through a personality-based approach. Our findings validate prior research on the general influence of broad and narrow personality traits on self-employment. However, our analysis also...

This study examines effects of mergers between Austrian banks from 2005 to 2018. Using matching techniques, we assess consequences for bank profitability and financial efficiency, as well as the impact on loan growth and a measure of social efficiency. Significant effects are observed in naive...

This note illustrates, by reconsidering the seminal optimal speed-of-transition model of Aghion, P., and O. J. Blanchard. (1994. "On the Speed of Transition in Central Europe." NBER Macroeconomics Annual 9: 283-319), that optimal transition paths, in general, exhibit nonlinearities and...

We examine how trade and policy uncertainty affect shipping freight rates, using a Bayesian Vector Autoregression (BVAR) model. Trade uncertainty has a strong effect on shipping costs, even though the effects become insignificant within a year. On the other hand, policy uncertainty has a...

This paper studies whether individuals that experienced parental unemployment during their childhood/early adolescence have poorer health once they reach the adulthood. We used data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 2002 until 2018. Our identification strategy of the causal effect of...

Portfolio models typically ignore precautionary transactions demands for liquid assets, and models of precautionary demands typically ignore asset rate-of-return risk. If asset-holders are risk-averse, however, both transactions risk and rate-of-return risk affect demands for both liquid and...