It is the charge of economic history not only to explain the economic past, but to use it to enrich and develop economic theory (North, 1994). In paleoeconomics, theory plays the additional role of adding veracity of accounts based on sparse evidence through the demonstration of internal consistency. We synthesize pre-historical and historical evidence available from the settlement and moderniz...

Although a lot of the empirical research have studied the relationship between changes of oil price and economic activity, it is surprising that little research has been conducted on the relationship between oil price shocks and the Greater China region (China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan). Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to apply a detail monthly data from 1997/7 to 2008/9 to fill up this ...

Over the last decade we have witnessed the rise and fall of the so-called new economy stocks. One central question is to what extent these new firms differ from traditional firms. Empirical evidence suggests that stock returns are not normally distributed. In this article we investigate whether this also holds for portfolios of stocks from a growth industry. Furthermore, we will compare this ty...

We measure the dollar risk exposure of U.S. industries by regressing stock portfolio returns on each industry against the returns on a broadly defined dollar index. The exposure estimates vary widely across different industries in both magnitudes and directions. We trace this large cross-sectional variation in dollar exposure to the industry’s average import and export activities. We find that ...

This paper uses an institutional approach to investigate the relationship between the regional institutional environment and regional new firm formation. The importance of perceived attitudes regarding private enterprises, local taxes, political majority, the size of the government sector and perceived rules and bureaucracy on new firm formation in 286 Swedish municipalities are investigated. T...

I introduce a model of corporate voting. I characterize the shareholder majority rule as the unique corporate voting rule that satisfies four axioms: anonymity, neutrality, share monotonicity, and merger, a property that requires consistency in election outcomes following stock-for-stock mergers. JEL classification: D71, D72, K22

This paper demonstrates that an asset pricing model with least-squares learning can lead to bubbles and crashes as endogenous responses to the fundamentals driving asset prices. When agents are risk-averse they generate forecasts of the conditional variance of a stock’s return. Recursive updating of the conditional variance and expected return implies two mechanisms through which learning impac...

State incentive granting for the purpose of firm retention or recruitment remains highly controversial and is often portrayed as antithetical to long-range economic development planning. This paper uses quasi-experimental methods to measure the impact of state-level economic development incentives on employment growth at the establishment level in North Carolina. Using North Carolina’s rich his...

Both sides of the institutions and growth debate have resorted largely to microeconometric techniques in testing hypotheses. In this paper, I build a panel structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model for a short panel of 119 countries over 10 years and find support for the institutions hypothesis. Controlling for individual fixed effects, I find that exogenous shocks to a proxy for institutio...

in this paper using catastrophe theory, we investigate non-smooth changes in tehran stock exchange. stock market crashes bring not only panic among investors, but also in deeper market lead to recession and decrease in consumer's confidence. as catastrophe theory is strong tool in explaining nonlinear phenomena, by applying stochastic cusp catastrophe model we examine sudden change in tehr...