Because sports are stylized combat, sports may follow power laws similar to those found for wars, individual clashes, and acts of terrorism. We show this fact for football (soccer) by adjusting power laws that show a close relationship between rank and points won by the clubs participating in...

We find favorable evidence for the textbook equilibrium exchange rate model of Stockman (1987) using Blanchard and Quah’s (1989) decomposition. Real shocks are shown to account for more than 90 percent of movements in the real exchange rate between Brazil and the US, and for more than half of...

This paper provides estimates of the elasticities of demand for the Brazilian basic plan of local fixed telephony using a cointegration model. We find a long-run price elasticity of –0.24, and an income elasticity of 0.18. These figures are line with other countries’ estimates.

The yuan-dollar returns prior to the 2005 revaluation show a Sierpinski triangle in an iterated function system clumpiness test. Yet the fractal vanishes after the revaluation. The Sierpinski commonly emerges in the chaos game, where randomness coexists with deterministic rules [2, 3]. Here it...

Investors seem to hold on to their losing stocks to a greater extent than they hold on to their winning stocks. This well-document behavioral regularity is termed disposition effect (Shefrin and Statman 1985). We set an experiment to replicate results from a previous study of the disposition...

Casey Mulligan suggested in The Economists' Voice that this recession was caused by "something [that] made real wages high and employment low." This coincides with his own view of the causes of the Great Depression. The similarity inevitably brings back General-Theory-Keynes, according to Da...

In explaining economic phenomena, economic analysis concentrates on selected influences and fixes the host of other factors under a ceteris paribus clause. This view, which goes back to Alfred Marshall (1842-1924), is developed in the first part of the book. Aggregation is viewed as a particular...

Life annuities provide a guaranteed income for the remainder of the recipient’s lifetime, and therefore, annuitization presents an important option when choosing an adequate investment strategy for the retirement ages. While there are numerous research articles studying annuities from a...

Even 50 years after Modigliani/Miller’s irrelevance theorem, the basic question of how firms choose their capital structure remains unclear. This survey paper aims at summarizing and discussing corresponding recent developments in empirical capital structure research, which, in our view, are...

There has been a wide-spread misconception based on the imprecise wording of Art. 52 of the European Patent Convention (EPC) that the protection of business methods by patents is prohibited in Europe. This paper investigates the legal framework set by patent laws with respect to the...