Research Papers

To get justice, targets must show measurable harm: economists can help.

The US federal lobbying industry, based in Washington DC, is major focal point for political money and the exercise of influence, with expenditures peaking at approximately $2.5 billion per annum during the first Obama administration. 

The U.S. presidential election of 2016 featured frontal challenges to the political establishments of both parties and perhaps the most shocking election upset in American history.

The consensus that reigned in macroeconomics before the financial crisis has come under renewed attack.

One might think of the satisfied consensus reigning in macroeconomics before the financial crisis (and still relatively entrenched) as evidence of “Groupthink” in a “Divided State”

The wind appears to be back in the sails of the Eurozone economy ….

The current crisis is the culmination of a process of integration that has profoundly changed the structure of each member state, their inter-relations and their power relations. One of its side effects was the rediscovery of the terms ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ to analyse the economic situations of the European countries.

The euro area has been experiencing a prolonged period of weak economic activity and very low inflation.

Some fresh reflections on ECB policy

Veiling among Muslim women is modeled as a commitment mechanism that limits temptation to deviate from religious norms of behavior. 

This paper examines the value of connections between German industry and the Nazi movement in early 1933. Drawing on previously unused contemporary sources about management and supervisory board composition and stock returns, we find that one out of seven firms, and a large proportion of the biggest companies, had substantive links with the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Firms supporting the Nazi movement experienced unusually high returns, outperforming unconnected ones by 5% to 8% between January and March 1933. These results are not driven by sectoral composition and are robust to alternative estimators and definitions of affiliation. 

Stock Market Returns and Corporate Networks 

“The Failure of Democracy” – “The weaknesses of Weimar” Do headlines such as these suggest that the whole architecture of the first German republic was wrong, that it was doomed right from the start, that the “collapse” was unavoidable?

In the paper that we present this afternoon, Soren Johansen, Anders Rahbek, Morten Tabor, and I introduce the Qualitative Expectations Hypothesis (QEH) as a new approach to modeling macroeconomic and financial outcomes.

After re-iterating five well-known theorems about the properties of conditional expectations in stationary settings—such as providing unbiased minimum mean square error predictions despite in- complete information, and the law of iterated expectations—we clarify unpredictability and illustrate its prevalence empirically.