A stepping stone arises in risky environments with learning and transferrable human capital. An example is the role played by academic two-year colleges in postsecondary education: Students, as they learn about the uncertain educational outcomes, can drop out or transfer up to harder and more...

The growing dissatisfaction with perceived distributional inequality and budgetary constraints gave rise to a discussion on the (re-)introduction of wealth taxes. Wealth taxes are typically levied on private wealth, in some countries also on corporate wealth. To avoid misleading statements...

The global economic crisis of 2008/2009 hit many firms hard. Faced with rapidly declining sales and highly uncertain economic prospects, firms had to cut costs and reconsider their business strategies. With respect to innovation, cost cutting often means to stop or underresource innovation...

We provide theoretical and empirical evidence that policy uncertainty can significantly affect firm level investment and entry decisions in the context of international trade. When market entry costs are sunk, policy uncertainty can create a real option value of waiting to enter foreign markets...

It is widely held that better financial reporting makes investors more confident in their predictions of future cash flows and reduces their required risk premia. The logic is that more information leads necessarily to more certainty, and hence lower subjective estimates of firm "beta" or...

This paper examines the causes of the exceptionally marked fall in non-construction investment in Italy since 2007. Non-financial private services were the main driver of the decline in the aggregate investment rate, but all sectors weighed in negatively; the reallocation of value added away...

In many countries, Next Generation Access networks (NGA) deployment and penetration rate proceed at a slower pace than expected. We argue that an ex ante contractual arrangement among access Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Content Providers (CPs), which builds on the complementarity...