We perform an experiment where subjects pay for the right to participate in a shareholder vote. We find that experimental subjects are willing to pay a significant premium for the voting right even though there should be no such premium in our setup under full rationality. Private benefits from...

This paper examines resident foreigners´ interest in German citizenship. The study focuseson the roles played by attitudes towards foreigners, political interest of foreigners,intergenerational conflict between natives and foreigners and among foreigners themselves,and regional differences in...

This paper focuses on tenure driven productivity dynamics of a firm-worker match asa potential explanation of "unemployment volatility puzzle". We let new matches andcontinuing jobs differ by their productivity levels and by their sensitivity to aggregateproductivity shocks. As a result, new...

Monetary Policy Committees differ in the way the interest rate proposal is preparedand presented in the policy meeting. In this paper we show analytically how differentarrangements could affect the voting behaviour of individual MPC members andtherefore policy outcomes. We then apply our results...

Sorting of people on the labor market not only assures the most productive use of valuableskills but also generates individual utility gains if people experience an optimal match betweenjob characteristics and their preferences. Based on individual data on subjective well-being it ispossible to...

This paper investigates the determinants of Swiss non-financial firms’ cash holdings overthe 1995 to 2004 period. The median Swiss firm holds almost twice as much cash andcash equivalents as the median UK or US firm. Our results indicate that there is a negativerelationship between asset...

We use a dynamic adjustment model and panel methodology to investigatethe determinants of a time- varying optimal capital structure. Because firmsmay temporarily deviate from their optimal capital structure in the presenceof adjustment costs, we also endogenize the adjustment process. In partic...

The measurement of voting power plays a useful role in the investigation of structural properties of collective decision-making rules which can be modelled as a simple (voting) game. Such rules can be found in legislative bodies, committees, and a variety of organizations.(...)

Building a model with three imperfect markets – goods, labor and credit – representing aproduct’s life-cycle, we find that goods market frictions drastically change the qualitative andquantitative dynamics of labor market variables. The calibrated model leads to a significantreduction in...

Unemployment may depend on equilibrium in other markets than the labor markets. Thispaper adresses this old idea by introducing search frictions on several markets: in a model ofcredit and labor market imperfections as in Wasmer and Weil (2004), I further introducesearch on the goods market. The...