In recent years, many social scientists have claimed that trust plays an important role in economic and social transactions. Despite its proposed importance, the measurement and the definition of trust seem to be not fully settled, and the identification of the exact role of trust in economic...

Most contracts, whether between voters and politicians or between house owners and contractors, are incomplete. "More law," it typically is assumed, increases the likelihood of contract performance by increasing the probability of enforcement and/or the cost of breach. This paper studies a...

Corporate scandals, reflected in excessive management compensation and fraudulent accounts, cause great damage. Agency theory’s insistence to link the compensation of mangers and directors as closely as possible to firm performance is a major reason for these scandals. They cannot be overcome...

In view of recent corporate scandals, it is argued that corporate governance can learn from public governance. Institutions devised to control and discipline the behavior of executives in the political sphere can give new insights into how to improve the governance of firms. Proposals in four...

Corporate scandals are reflected in excessive top management compensation and fraudulent accounts. These scandals cause an enormous amount of damage, not only to the companies affected, but also to the market economy as a whole. As a solution, conventional wisdom suggests more monitoring and...

This paper examines the role of other-regarding and time preferences for cooperation in the field. We study the preferences of fishermen whose main, and often only, source of income stems from using a common pool resource (CPR). The exploitation of a CPR involves a negative interpersonal and...

This paper advances two propositions, one concerning content, the other concerning research strategy. (1) The advent of wide-spread internet publishing reduces the stifling impact of the refereeing process on the papers accepted and submitted to journals. Economics scholars are less bound to...

In Part I the author was concerned with modeling the monthly logarithmic CHF/USD exchange rate, ''s''. He rejected a model proposed by B.T. McCallum. Searching for a more appropriate framework a story by P. De Grauwe was introduced, bringing complex cognitive processes and social practices into...

The analysis of monthly exchange rates is carried out using a model of McCallum, which is based on the concept of Rational Expectations. Applying the model to the CHF/USD exchange rate starting a misspecification analysis, the RE component appears to be a weak point of the model. The theory of...

We study alternative institutional arrangements for the determination of monetary policy in a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents, where monetary policy has redistributive effects. Inflation is determined by a policy board using either simple-majority voting, supermajority...