A fund’s performance is usually compared to the performance of an index or other funds. If a fund trails the benchmark, the fund manager is often replaced. We argue that this may lead to excessive risk-taking if fund managers differ in ability and have the opportunity to take excessive risk. To match the benchmark, fund managers may increase the risk of their portfolio even if this decreases th...

Abstract I find that approximately 30% of price fluctuations in the Fama-French size and value factors are nonfundamental pressures driven by correlated fund flows, which generate movements revert over time. Is this really demand-based pressure? show effects happen exclusively periods when mutual funds place trades, a fact is difficult to explain using traditional mechanisms such as unobserved ...

Jobs offer different wages and different non-monetary working conditions. This paper investigates how the demand for non-monetary aspects evolves over changing wealth levels. Wages do not perfectly compensate individuals for differential utility of jobs in a labour market with informational frictions. Changes in wealth may then affect preferences for different jobs. Willingness to pay for non-m...

Using data of the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) earnings differentials between self-employed and wage-employed workers in the German labor market are explored. Previous research based on US data reports lower incomes for entrepreneurs. In contrast to that, the findings of this contribution suggest the opposite for German entrepreneurs. They have considerably higher earnings than wage-empl...

Family-Friendly Work Practices in Britain: Availability and Perceived Accessibility Using linked data for British workplaces and employees we find a low base rate of workplacelevel availability for five family-friendly work practices – parental leave, paid leave, job sharing, subsidized child care, and working at home – and a substantially lower rate of individual-level perceived accessibility....

This paper investigates the effect of private pensions on the retirement wealth distribution. We incorporate stochastic private pension coverage into a calibrated life-cycle model with stochastic earnings. Private pensions lead to higher net worth inequality at retirement, which is closer to the inequality observed in the PSID than a model without private pensions. However, the offset effect of...

This paper introduces a noncausal autoregressive process with Cauchy errors in application to the exchange rates of the Bitcoin electronic currency against the US Dollar. The dynamics of the daily Bitcoin/USD exchange rate series displays episodes of local trends, which can be modelled and interpreted as speculative bubbles. The bubbles may result from the speculative component in the on-line t...