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This paper uses laboratory experiments to provide a systematic analysis of how di↵erent presentation formats a↵ect individuals’ investment decisions. The results indicate that the type of presentation as well as personal characteristics influence both, the consistency of decisions and the riskiness of investment choices. However, while personal characteristics have a larger impact on consistency, the chosen risk level is determined more by framing e↵ects. On the level of personal characteristics, participants’ decisions show that better financial literacy and a better understanding of the presentation format enhance consistency and thus decision quality. Moreover, female participants on average make less consistent decisions and tend to prefer less risky alternatives. On the level of framing dimensions, subjects choose riskier investments when possible outcomes are shown in absolute values rather than rates of return and when the loss potential is less obvious. In particular, reducing the emphasis on downside risk and upside potential simultaneously leads to a substantial increase in risk taking.
Gegenstand des Beitrages ist das Konzeptionsproblem der juristischen Schlüsselqualifikationen, das bisher auf der Ebene der Gesetzgebung, der Wissenschaft und der Praxis ungelöst ist. Gerade diese Tatsache könnte paradoxerweise mittel- und langfristig dazu führen, dass sich das Profil rechtswissenschaftlicher Fakultäten schärft, die Schlüsselqualifikationen in ihre rechtswissenschaftliche Ausbildung systematisch, aber nicht naiv, integrieren. Dazu muss ein funktionaler Blick auf die in den universitären Alltag zu integrierenden Schlüsselqualifikationen geworfen werden. Diese sind nicht selbsterklärend, sondern lediglich Mittel, die einem bestimmten Zweck dienen, der selbst wieder begründungsbedürftig ist. Wer als Studierender von einer Profilbildung juristischer Fakultäten profitieren will, sollte sich mit den zunehmend deutlicher werdenden Entwicklungen auseinander setzen, die dazu führen, Schlüsselqualifikationen auf eine je charakteristische Weise in den Ausbildungsalltag einer Fakultät einzubinden - oder aus diesem auszuschließen. Zu wünschen wäre, dass sich über kurz oder lang ein hochschulübergreifendes Forum herausbildet. Ziel wäre es, die Praxisrelevanz der rechtswissenschaftlichen Ausbildung zu steigern und deren Hinwendung zu rechtsdidaktischen, deontologischen und konzeptionellen Fragen zu ermöglichen, ohne das wissenschaftliche Fundament der Hochschulen und deren Autonomie einzuschränken, sondern beides im Idealfall zu stimulieren. Die Verfasser, die beide seit Jahren Seminare am Fachbereichszentrum für Schlüsselqualifikationen des Fachbereichs FB 01 der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main leiten, stellen damit keine Prognose auf, dass die Integration von Schlüsselqualifikationen im hier beschriebenen Sinn flächendeckend stattfinden oder gelingen wird. Nichtsdestoweniger zeigt sich am Umgang mit den Schlüsselqualifikationen exemplarisch, welche Analysen und Ableitungen eine Hochschule aus dem gesetzlich vorgegebenen Dialog zwischen Theorie und Praxis entwickelt hat. Hieraus lassen sich wiederum Schlussfolgerungen über den Zustand der Hochschulausbildung in Deutschland ziehen. Nach Auffassung der Autoren haben Hochschulen mit inklusivem Ansatz eine bessere Chance zur Bewahrung der eigenen Autonomie als solche, die sich gegenüber tendenziell übergriffigen Akteuren aus Wirtschaft und Politik (vermeintlich) kategorisch abschotten. Hochschulen, die das Stadium einer leitbildgetreuen Dialogfähigkeit erreichen, haben es einfacher, neben ihrer Wettbewerbsfähigkeit auch ihr Kernanliegen zu behaupten. Die Bedeutung von Hochschulen, die ihre Augen vor einer Aufweichung des ihnen zukommenden Forschungs-, Lehr- und Bildungsauftrags verschließen, wird, so die Prognose der Autoren, in Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft und Politik auf Dauer schwinden.
Luis de Molina (1535-1600) grants slaves a legal status through which they can take up a position with respect to their masters between equivalent legal entity and legal object. Here, what is decisive is the figure of the subjective right, which both for Molina and modern proponents of this legal concept describes the 'right per se'. According to Molina's definition of ius, the denial of a subjective right or the hindrance of exercising an individual right represents an injustice. The rights granted to a slave in virtue of his being regarded a human being (despite the condition of slavery) serve to protect the slave against unjust acts. Molina does not distinguish the slave as a legal entity as separate from his master insofar as the slave should be protected against injustices committed against him or his property; injustices for which he would be entitled to compensation. Yet, the slave is not able to stake his claim to a particular right because it is not possible for him to take the matter to court. His natural law justified coequal legal status with respect to his master is limited in such a way by the positive legal order (by means of which slavery is generally made possible) that he is to be held legally incompetent as a legal entity with regard to defending and enforcing his 'qua homo'-legal rights. This precarious situation is due to the complicated legal intermediate position of a human legal entity, which, at the same time, represents the legal object of another person.
Futures markets are a potentially valuable source of information about market expectations. Exploiting this information has proved difficult in practice, because the presence of a time-varying risk premium often renders the futures price a poor measure of the market expectation of the price of the underlying asset. Even though the expectation in principle may be recovered by adjusting the futures price by the estimated risk premium, a common problem in applied work is that there are as many measures of market expectations as there are estimates of the risk premium. We propose a general solution to this problem that allows us to uniquely pin down the best possible estimate of the market expectation for any set of risk premium estimates. We illustrate this approach by solving the long-standing problem of how to recover the market expectation of the price of crude oil. We provide a new measure of oil price expectations that is considerably more accurate than the alternatives and more economically plausible. We discuss implications of our analysis for the estimation of economic models of energy-intensive durables, for the debate on speculation in oil markets, and for oil price forecasting.
On average, "young" people underestimate whereas "old" people overestimate their chances to survive into the future. We adopt a Bayesian learning model of ambiguous survival beliefs which replicates these patterns. The model is embedded within a non-expected utility model of life-cycle consumption and saving. Our analysis shows that agents with ambiguous survival beliefs (i) save less than originally planned, (ii) exhibit undersaving at younger ages, and (iii) hold larger amounts of assets in old age than their rational expectations counterparts who correctly assess their survival probabilities. Our ambiguity-driven model therefore simultaneously accounts for three important empirical findings on household saving behavior.
This paper solves a dynamic model of households' mortgage decisions incorporating labor income, house price, inflation, and interest rate risk. It uses a zero-profit condition for mortgage lenders to solve for equilibrium mortgage rates given borrower characteristics and optimal decisions. The model quantifies the effects of adjustable vs. fixed mortgage rates, loan-to-value ratios, and mortgage affordability measures on mortgage premia and default. Heterogeneity in borrowers' labor income risk is important for explaining the higher default rates on adjustable-rate mortgages during the recent US housing downturn, and the variation in mortgage premia with the level of interest rates.
Riley (1979)'s reactive equilibrium concept addresses problems of equilibrium existence in competitive markets with adverse selection. The game-theoretic interpretation of the reactive equilibrium concept in Engers and Fernandez (1987) yields the Rothschild-Stiglitz (1976)/Riley (1979) allocation as an equilibrium allocation, however multiplicity of equilibrium emerges. In this note we imbed the reactive equilibrium's logic in a dynamic market context with active consumers. We show that the Riley/Rothschild-Stiglitz contracts constitute the unique equilibrium allocation in any pure strategy subgame perfect Nash equilibrium.
This paper analyzes how on-the-job search (OJS) by an agent impacts the moral hazard problem in a repeated principal-agent relationship. OJS is found to constitute a source of agency costs because efficient search incentives require that the agent receives all gains from trade. Further, the optimal incentive contract with OJS matches the design of empirically observed compensation contracts more accurately than models that ignore OJS. In particular, the optimal contract entails excessive performance pay plus efficiency wages. Efficiency wages reduce the opportunity costs of work effort and hence serve as a complement to bonuses. Thus, the model offers a novel explanation for the use of efficiency wages. When allowing for renegotiation, the model generates wage and turnover dynamics that are consistent with empirical evidence. I argue that the model contributes to explaining the concomitant rise in the use of performance pay and in competition for high-skill workers during the last three decades.
From the late middle ages to early modern times (ca. 1200-1600) the Lübeck City Council was the most important courthouse in the Baltic. About 100 cities and towns on its shores lived according to the law of Lübeck. The paper deals with the old theory that Imperial law, i.e. mainly the learned Ius commune, was generally rejected by the council on the grounds of its foreign nature. The paper rejects this view with the help of 8 case studies. There exist rather spectacular statements against Imperial Law, but a closer look reveals that they have to be seen in the light of a specific practical context. They must not be confounded with general statements in which the council had no interest. Its attitude towards Learned Law was flexible and purely pragmatic.
This paper explores consequences of consumer education on prices and welfare in retail financial markets when some consumers are naive about shrouded add-on prices and firms try to exploit it. Allowing for different information and pricing strategies we show that education is unlikely to push firms to disclose prices towards all consumers, which would be socially efficient. Instead, price discrimination emerges as a new equilibrium. Further, due to a feedback on prices, education that is good for consumers who become sophisticated may be bad for consumers who stay naive and even for the group of all consumers as a whole
Advertising arbitrage
(2014)
Speculators often advertise arbitrage opportunities in order to persuade other investors and thus accelerate the correction of mispricing. We show that in order to minimize the risk and the cost of arbitrage an investor who identifies several mispriced assets optimally advertises only one of them, and overweights it in his portfolio; a risk-neutral arbitrageur invests only in this asset. The choice of the asset to be advertised depends not only on mispricing but also on its "advertisability" and accuracy of future news about it. When several arbitrageurs identify the same arbitrage opportunities, their decisions are strategic complements: they invest in the same asset and advertise it. Then, multiple equilibria may arise, some of which inefficient: arbitrageurs may correct small mispricings while failing to eliminate large ones. Finally, prices react more strongly to the ads of arbitrageurs with a successful track record, and reputation-building induces high-skill arbitrageurs to advertise more than others.
We study the behavioral underpinnings of adopting cash versus electronic payments in retail transactions. A novel theoretical and experimental framework is developed to primarily assess the impact of sellers’ service fees and buyers’ rewards from using electronic payments. Buyers and sellers face a coordination problem, independently choosing a payment method before trading. In the experiment, sellers readily adopt electronic payments but buyers do not. Eliminating service fees or introducing rewards significantly boosts the adoption of electronic payments. Hence, buyers’ incentives play a pivotal role in the diffusion of electronic payments but monetary incentives cannot fully explain their adoption choices. Findings from this experiment complement empirical findings based on surveys and field data.
This paper is the first to conduct an incentive-compatible experiment using real monetary payoffs to test the hypothesis of probabilistic insurance which states that willingness to pay for insurance decreases sharply in the presence of even small default probabilities as compared to a risk-free insurance contract. In our experiment, 181 participants state their willingness to pay for insurance contracts with different levels of default risk. We find that the willingness to pay sharply decreases with increasing default risk. Our results hence strongly support the hypothesis of probabilistic insurance. Furthermore, we study the impact of customer reaction to default risk on an insurer’s optimal solvency level using our experimentally obtained data on insurance demand. We show that an insurer should choose to be default-free rather than having even a very small default probability. This risk strategy is also optimal when assuming substantial transaction costs for risk management activities undertaken to achieve the maximum solvency level.
Motivated by the question whether sound and expressive applicative similarities for program calculi with should-convergence exist, this paper investigates expressive applicative similarities for the untyped call-by-value lambda-calculus extended with McCarthy's ambiguous choice operator amb. Soundness of the applicative similarities w.r.t. contextual equivalence based on may-and should-convergence is proved by adapting Howe's method to should-convergence. As usual for nondeterministic calculi, similarity is not complete w.r.t. contextual equivalence which requires a rather complex counter example as a witness. Also the call-by-value lambda-calculus with the weaker nondeterministic construct erratic choice is analyzed and sound applicative similarities are provided. This justifies the expectation that also for more expressive and call-by-need higher-order calculi there are sound and powerful similarities for should-convergence.
Are rules and boundaries sufficient to limit harmful central bank discretion? Lessons from Europe
(2014)
Marvin Goodfriend’s (2014) insightful, informative and provocative work explains concisely and convincingly why the Fed needs rules and boundaries. This paper reviews the broader institutional design problem regarding the effectiveness of the central bank in practice and confirms the need for rules and boundaries. The framework proposed for improving the Fed incorporates key elements that have already been adopted in the European Union. The case of ELA provision by the ECB and the Central Bank of Cyprus to Marfin-Laiki Bank during the crisis, however, suggests that the existence of rules and boundaries may not be enough to limit harmful discretion. During a crisis, novel interpretations of the legal authority of the central bank may be introduced to create a grey area that might be exploited to justify harmful discretionary decisions even in the presence of rules and boundaries. This raises the question how to ensure that rules and boundaries are respected in practice
This chapter analyzes the risk and return characteristics of investments in artists from the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) region over the sample period 2000 to 2012. With hedonic regression modeling we create an annual index that is based on 3,544 paintings created by 663 MENA artists. Our empirical results prove that investing in such a hypothetical index provides strong financial returns. While the results show an exponential growth in sales since 2006, the geometric annual return of the MENA art index is a stable13.9 percent over the whole period. We conclude that investing in MENA paintings would have been profitable but also note that we examined the performance of an emerging art market that has only seen an upward trend without any correction, yet.
Arzneimittelrückstände werden heute in zahlreichen Gewässern nachgewiesen. Kleinste Spuren finden sich sogar im Trinkwasser. Auch wenn die Konzentrationen in der Regel sehr gering sind, belegen Forschungsergebnisse für einzelne Wirkstoffe klare Umweltrisiken. Fische, Frösche und Kleinstlebewesen zeigen deutliche Reaktionen auf Medikamentenwirkstoffe im Wasser. Gefahren für die menschliche Gesundheit bestehen nach heutigem Kenntnisstand nicht. Aus Umweltschutz- und Vorsorgegründen ist es jedoch geboten, die Einträge von Arzneimittelwirkstoffen in die Umwelt zu reduzieren. Der aktuelle rechtliche Rahmen liefert für wirksame Maßnahmen kaum eine Handhabe. Deshalb muss auch über Handlungsmöglichkeiten nachgedacht werden, die jenseits rechtlicher Lösungsansätze durchführbar sind. Der hier vorgelegte Text umreißt den gegenwärtigen Wissensstand zum Thema „Arzneimittelwirkstoffe im Wasserkreislauf“ und zeigt praktische Handlungsoptionen auf, wie der Eintrag von Arzneimittelwirkstoffen in die Umwelt verringert werden kann. Dabei wird ein integrierter Ansatz verfolgt, der Handlungsmöglichkeiten auf drei verschiedenen Ebenen empfiehlt: bei der Arzneimittelentwicklung, der technischen Abwasserbehandlung und beim Umgang mit Arzneimitteln. Dieser Bericht ist im Rahmen des Projekts „Arznei für Mensch und Umwelt?“ im Auftrag des Umweltbundesamtes entstanden und richtet sich in erster Linie an die Zielgruppe Ärztinnen/Ärzte und Studierende der Medizin.
Arzneimittelrückstände lassen sich heute in nahezu allen Gewässern nachweisen. Die Konzentrationen sind sehr gering; dennoch werden Risiken für die Umwelt und die Menschen vermutet. Daher ist zu klären, ob und wie es möglich ist, in Verfolgung des Vorsorgegedankens ihren Eintrag in die aquatische Umwelt möglichst zu verhindern oder zumindest zu reduzieren. Hierzu bieten sich umwelttechnische und gesundheitspolitische Maßnahmen sowie innovative Ansätze in der Arzneimittelentwicklung an.
Im Rahmen des BMBF-Projekts „SAUBER+ Innovative Konzepte und Technologien für die separate Behandlung von Abwasser aus Einrichtungen des Gesundheitswesens“ sind im Austausch mit Praxisakteuren zwei Zukunftsszenarien entstanden. Diese beschreiben von heute bis zum Jahr 2030 wie Maßnahmen in den genannten Handlungsfeldern umgesetzt und miteinander kombiniert werden können. Das erste Szenario ist eine Fortführung der bisherigen Entwicklungen. Im zweiten wird hingegen davon ausgegangen, dass sich die Bundesregierung einer sektor-übergreifenden Nachhaltigkeitspolitik verpflichtet und sich auf diese Weise die Einträge in die aquatische Umwelt auf ein Minimum reduzieren lassen.
We outline a procedure for consistent estimation of marginal and joint default risk in the euro area financial system. We interpret the latter risk as the intrinsic financial system fragility and derive several systemic fragility indicators for euro area banks and sovereigns, based on CDS prices. Our analysis documents that although the fragility of the euro area banking system had started to deteriorate before Lehman Brothers' file for bankruptcy, investors did not expect the crisis to affect euro area sovereigns' solvency until September 2008. Since then, and especially after November 2009, joint sovereign default risk has outpaced the rise of systemic risk within the banking system.