Using a unique confidential contract level dataset merged with firm-level asset price data, we find robust evidence that firms' stock market valuations and employment levels respond more to monetary policy announcements the higher the degree of wage rigidity. Data on the renegotiations of...

Using a panel of survey-based annual investor relations (IR) rankings of European companies, we provide evidence suggesting that the marginal benefit of IR is greater in countries with capital markets that are less outside-shareholder oriented. For firms located in these countries, we find that...

Contract farming is typically seen as a useful mechanism to help smallholders. However, despite economic benefits, high dropout rates from contract schemes are commonplace. We use data from Ghana to show that smallholders benefit from a resource-providing contract in terms of higher yields and...

In the existing literature, the effects of contract farming on household welfare were examined with mixed results. Most studies looked at single contract types. This paper contributes to the literature by comparing two types of contracts - simple marketing contracts and resource-providing...

With the ECB's policy rate having reached the zero lower bound, traditional monetary policy tools became ineffective and the ECB was forced to adopt a set of unconventional monetary policy (UMP) measures. This paper examines the effects of the ECB's UMP on inflation expectations in the Euro area...

We investigate the predictive power of several leading indicators in order to forecast industrial production in Germany. In addition, we compare their predictive performance with variables from two competing categories, namely macroeconomic and financial variables. The predictive power within...

The International Competition Network (ICN) celebrates its 20th birthday in 2020. It governs global competition by providing a cooperative forum for (mostly national) competition authorities from all around the world. In the absence of binding global competition rules and antitrust laws, it...

We show that the discontinuity in the distribution of surveyed female income shares at the margin where a woman would outearn her partner is primarily driven by norm induced misreporting in surveys. We draw on unique Swiss data combining survey and administrative information for the same...

First-past-the-post elections in single-member districts make legislators more accountable to their district of election compared to proportional electoral systems. Accountability makes politicians more sensitive to voters' preferences when deciding where and how to allocate public expenditure,...

In this paper, we introduce the concept of a Digital Layer to empirically investigate inter-firm relations at any geographical scale of analysis. The Digital Layer is created from large-scale, structured web scraping of firm websites, their textual content and the hyperlinks among them. Using...