Due to its overwhelming significance among taxes on earnings in the agricultural and forestry sector, the analyses are primarily concentrated on the international comparison of effective income tax burden in the selected EU Member States as well as Canada, the United States and Japan. In this...

In this paper, we investigate the claim that German banks are special compared to banks in other industrialised economies. We show that banks are of particular importance to the German economy?as financial intermediary, as lender to the corporate sector, and as part of the corporate governance...

The paper shows that, as owners accumulate larger stakes and hence become less risk-tolerant, their incentives to monitor management are attenuated because monitoring shifts some of the firm's risk from management to owners. This counterbalances the positive effect which more concentrated...

A contingent claims valuation model which allows to highlight the implications of program trading in spot markets for the pricing of European-style foreign currency options and for the volatility strike structure implicit in these contracts is devoloped. The curvature of the volatility strike...

Previous studies have mainly used reports in the financial press to analyze the link between the interventions of the Bank of Japan (BoJ) and exchange rate volatility. We use official intervention data for the period 1993-2000 that were released only recently by the BoJ and find that the...

There is no consensus about the causes of the reduction in business cycle volatility seen in many major economies over the last decade. Using stylised models of the economies of the US, Euro area, UK and Japan, we argue that economic stability has been fostered by improved monetary policy and by...

This study uses Fehr, Jokisch, and Kotlikoff's (2004a) dynamic general equilibrium model to analyze the effects of changes in fertility and mortality on the developed world's demographic transition. The model features three regions – the U.S., Japan, and the EU-15 – and incorporates age- and...

This paper characterises rules-based fiscal policy setting. Basically, we translate a standard monetary policy rule into a simple fiscal policy rule. We then infer on fiscal policymakers' reaction coefficients by testing the rule with GMM. Interaction is also tested directly by the inclusion of...