Gianni Toniolo was one of Italy's, and Europe's, foremost economic historians. Unfortunately, he suddenly passed away in November 2022, a few weeks after he had presented in Rome his newest book, the first volume of his history of the Bank of Italy, Storia della Banca d'Italia. Tomo I....

The rise of a crisis-prone banking sector and its political power has received significant attention following the most recent financial crisis. The crisis sparked a growing interest in understanding how and why we have created a world of large, unstable banks. Excessive banking activity arose...

This dissertation consists of six self-contained chapters that are related to the behavior of firms and politicians in a broader sense. After an introduction to the topic, the first part of the dissertation elaborates on how institutional and political framework conditions influence the behavior...

This thesis was written by Jakob Eberl while having been a research assistant at the Center for Economic Studies (CES) at the University of Munich. It was completed in December 2015 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich in May 2016. The...

Friedrich Hayek has been one of the dominating intellectual figures of the 20th century. Hayek, together with Gunnar Myrdal, received the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, for "their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the...

Das internationale Bankensystem stand in den vergangenen Jahren im Fokus des öffentlichen Interesses. Bei der Diskussion möglicher Optionen zur Verbesserung der Finanzsystemstabilität rückt zunehmend die Corporate Governance in Banken in den Fokus. Der vorliegende Forschungsbericht widmet...

This thesis strives to offer new insights in two main areas. First, in the well-researched domain of payment cards chapters 2 and 3 investigate an aspect that has hitherto been scantly examined, namely, the fact that merchant usage fees differ substantially among merchant sectors. Additionally,...