Cooperation Norms in Multiple‐Stage Punishment

We analyze the interplay between cooperation norms and people’s punishment behavior in a social‐dilemma game with multiple punishment stages. By combining multiple punishment stages with self‐contained episodes of interaction, we are able to disentangle the effects of retaliation and norm‐related punishment. An additional treatment provides information on the norms bystanders use in judging punishment actions. Partly confirming previous findings, punishment behavior and bystanders’ opinions are guided by an absolute norm. This norm is consistent over decisions and punishment stages and requires full contributions. In the first punishment stage, our results suggest a higher personal involvement of punishers, leading to a nonlinearity defined by the punishers’ contribution. In later punishment stages, the personal‐involvement effect vanishes and retaliation kicks in. Bystanders generally apply the same criteria as punishers in all stages.     

Fiscal Stimulus in Times of High Debt: Reconsidering Multipliers and Twin Deficits

We investigate the impact of fiscal stimuli at different levels of the government debt‐to‐GDP ratio for a sample of 17 European countries from 1970 to 2010. This is implemented in an interacted panel VAR framework in which all coefficient parameters are allowed to change continuously with the debt‐to‐GDP ratio. We find that responses to government spending shocks exhibit strong nonlinear behavior. While the overall cumulative effect of a spending shock on real GDP is positive and significant at moderate debt‐to‐GDP ratios, this effect turns negative as the ratio increases. The total cumulative effect on the trade balance as a share of GDP is negative at first but switches sign at higher levels of debt. Consequently, depending on the degree of public indebtedness, our results accommodate long‐run fiscal multipliers that are greater and smaller than one or even negative as well as twin deficit and twin divergence behavior within one sample and time period. From a policy perspective, these results lend additional support to increased prudence at high public debt ratios because the effectiveness of fiscal stimuli to boost economic activity or resolve external imbalances may not be guaranteed.     

Carry Trades and Global Foreign Exchange Volatility

We investigate the relation between global foreign exchange (FX) volatility risk and the cross section of excess returns arising from popular strategies that borrow in low interest rate currencies and invest in high interest rate currencies, so‐called “carry trades.” We find that high interest rate currencies are negatively related to innovations in global FX volatility, and thus deliver low returns in times of unexpected high volatility, when low interest rate currencies provide a hedge by yielding positive returns. Furthermore, we show that volatility risk dominates liquidity risk and our volatility risk proxy also performs well for pricing returns of other portfolios.     

Information Flows in Foreign Exchange Markets: Dissecting Customer Currency Trades

We study the information in order flows in the world's largest over‐the‐counter market, the foreign exchange (FX) market. The analysis draws on a data set covering a broad cross‐section of currencies and different customer segments of FX end‐users. The results suggest that order flows are highly informative about future exchange rates and provide significant economic value. We also find that different customer groups can share risk with each other effectively through the intermediation of a large dealer, and differ markedly in their predictive ability, trading styles, and risk exposure.     

Frailty Correlated Default

The probability of extreme default losses on portfolios of U.S. corporate debt is much greater than would be estimated under the standard assumption that default correlation arises only from exposure to observable risk factors. At the high confidence levels at which bank loan portfolio and collateralized debt obligation (CDO) default losses are typically measured for economic capital and rating purposes, conventionally based loss estimates are downward biased by a full order of magnitude on test portfolios. Our estimates are based on U.S. public nonfinancial firms between 1979 and 2004. We find strong evidence for the presence of common latent factors, even when controlling for observable factors that provide the most accurate available model of firm-by-firm default probabilities.     

ECONOMIC INCENTIVES AND HOSPITALIZATION IN GERMANY

The dramatically rising health expenditures have become a matter of prime concern. Using a rich panel dataset this paper contributes to this debate by investigating factors determining the demand for hospitalization in Germany. While most previous studies have found a significant impact of social insurance on the demand for hospital trips, the empirical results presented here cast doubts on the role of those economic incentives. There are also important differences in the hospitalization behaviour of men and women, and between the full sample and those with chronic conditions, which have been neglected by the literature. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Is Proprietary Trading Detrimental to Retail Investors?

We study the conflict of interest that arises when a universal bank conducts proprietary trading alongside its retail banking services. Our data set contains the stock holdings of every German bank and those of their corresponding retail clients. We investigate (i) whether banks sell stocks from their proprietary portfolios to their retail customers, (ii) whether those stocks subsequently underperform, and (iii) whether retail customers of banks engaging in proprietary trading earn lower portfolio returns than their peers. We present affirmative evidence for all three questions and conclude that proprietary trading can, in fact, be detrimental to retail investors.     

Personal Bankruptcy and Credit Market Competition

We document a link between U.S. credit supply and rising personal bankruptcy rates. We exploit the exogenous variation in market contestability brought on by banking deregulation—the relaxation of entry restrictions in the 1980s and 1990s—at the state level. We find deregulation explains at least 10% of the rise in bankruptcy rates. We also find that deregulation leads to increased lending, lower loss rates on loans, and higher lending productivity. Our findings indicate that increased competition prompted banks to adopt sophisticated credit rating technology, allowing for new credit extension to existing and previously excluded households.     

Technology–Policy Interaction in Frictional Labour-Markets

Does capital-embodied technological change play an important role in shaping labour-market outcomes? To address this question, we develop a model with vintage capital and search-matching frictions where irreversible investment in new vintages of capital creates heterogeneity in productivity among firms, matched as well as vacant. We demonstrate that capital-embodied technological change reduces labour demand and raises equilibrium unemployment and unemployment durations. In addition, the presence of labour-market regulations (unemployment benefits, payroll taxes, and firing costs) exacerbates these effects. Thus, the model is qualitatively consistent with some key features of the European labour-market experience relative to that of the U.S.: it features a sharper rise in unemployment and a sharper fall in the vacancy rate and the labour share. A calibrated version of our model suggests that this technology–policy interaction could explain a sizeable fraction of the observed differences between the U.S. and Europe.