This paper investigates the Becker-Woessmann (2009) argument that Protestants were more prosperous in nineteenth-century Prussia because they were more literate, a version of the Weber thesis, and shows that it cannot be sustained. The econometric analysis on which Becker and Woessman based...

Voigtländer and Voth argue that the Black Death shifted England towards pastoral agriculture, increasing wages for unmarried women, thereby delaying female marriage, lowering fertility, and unleashing economic growth. We show that this argument does not hold. Its crucial assumption is...

The medieval Champagne fairs are widely used to draw lessons about the institutional basis for long-distance impersonal exchange. This paper re-examines the causes of the outstanding success of the Champagne fairs in mediating international trade, the timing and causes of the fairs' decline, and...

This paper shows that Tabellini’s recent claim to have provided evidence that culture has a causal effect on economic development is unjustified. Tabellini’s claim is based on an instrumental variables analysis in which two instruments are used to identify the supposed causal effect. One of...

This paper uses German evidence to address two questions about corporate governance. The effects of ownership on corporate governance have received much recent attention, but very little of this has been devoted to the appropriate way to measure firm ownership. The results of this paper show...

This paper analyzes a model of corporate tax competition with repeated interaction and with strategic use of profit shifting within multinationals. We show that international tax coordination is more likely to prevail if the degree of asymmetry in terms of productivity differences between...

We argue a holdout is not a destructive investor behaviour but a rational investment decision. This investment decision is characterised by the mean-variance approach. We investigate intercreditor conflict by diverse portfolio structure. We demonstrate that at some point during the Greek (2012)...

This paper analyzes to which extent foreign plant ownership involves lower tax payments than domestic plant ownership. We employ a model of endogenous foreign subsidiary ownership to derive a set of empirically testable hypotheses about the differential taxation of foreign- and...

This paper investigates regulation on corporate income taxation with multinationals and transfer pricing. We recommend full cooperation within the EU if profit shifting costs are sufficiently low and cannot be influenced to a large extend. Otherwise, high profit shifting costs or the potential...

Concentrated ownership of large listed companies is widespread throughout the world, and Germany is typical in this respect. This paper proposes a method of distinguishing empirically between the beneficial and harmful effects of ownership concentration, and applies it to German data. The...