Several frictions restrict the government’s ability to tax assets. First of all, it is very costly to monitor trades on international asset markets. Moreover, agents can resort to non-observable low-return assets such as cash, gold or foreign currencies if taxes on observable assets become too high. This paper shows that limitations in asset observability have important consequences for the tax...

In the knowledge-based economy the wealth-creating capacity of organisations is no longer based on tangible assets such as buildings, equipment, and vehicles alone. Intangible assets are key contributors to securing sustainable competitive advantage. It is therefore critically important that intangible Information Assets (IA) such as data, documents, content on web sites, and knowledge are unde...

Intangible assets are regarded as the future value drivers of company performance. The increased economic importance requires an intensified analyst and investor awareness of (reported) intangible assets and their financial reporting quality. However, hardly anything is known about the actual importance and influence of different intangible asset classes in different industries. To fill this ga...

We study portfolio diversification in an experimental decision task, where asset returns depend on a draw from an ambiguous urn. Holding other information identical and controlling for the level of ambiguity, we find that labeling assets as being familiar or from the homeland of subjects increases portfolio weights by around 25%, respectively; although the return-generating process remains unaf...

I define a notion of completitive equilibrium for asset markets where assets are heterogeneous and traders have heterogenoeus information about them. I then apply this notion to a model of distressed sales under asymmetric information and examine whether it can account for fire sales: sharp drops in prices when distressed agents need to sell assets. Standard models of asymmetric information wit...

Digital asset management is one of promising applications of blockchain technology. Blockchains could provide principal disintermediation between digital asset issuers, application developers and consumers and decouple tasks related to asset management, such as issuance, transaction processing, securing users’ funds and establishing users’ identities. This paper outlines basic components of blo...

Theoretical finance is essentially the study of inter-temporal arbitrage, but it is often interesting also to analyze relationships between asset prices. Cross-sectional analysis makes it possible to purge both field and laboratory data of unobservable changes in time-varying fundamentals. Also, although backward induction is at the heart of asset-pricing theory, subjects may find its logic dau...

BACKGROUND The effective management of content is a key challenge in the digital era. The publishing of websites is often a spectacular and expensive " once-off " exercise that delivers an impressive result in the short term, but in the long term represents many challenges for content management and re-use. Currency of website content rapidly becomes an issue. Similarly, many organisations have...

Social norms are often posited as an explanation of differences in the economic behavior and performance of societies that are difficult to explain by differences in endowments and technology. The successful integration of social norms into economic models requires an understanding of the basis of the differences in preferences that lead to different behaviors. I explore the difference between ...

In the past two decades poverty focused policy has changed remarkably in the South. This can be summarized as a shift from residual welfare poverty-alleviation strategies, commonly associated with ‘safety nets’, to social protection poverty-reduction policies. The latter in principle has a far broader mandate incorporating risk prevention and mitigation strategies, as well as the perennially ne...