The impact of uncertainty on firms' investment outlays is subject to an ongoing debate. Theory identifies several channels. Irreversibility, financing constraints and risk aversion make a negative relationship between uncertainty and investment likely. On the other hand, the ability of firms to...

Is the euro area getting closer with regard to business cycles? The study investigates the linkage between business cycle convergence and financial portfolio choice for a panel of 18 European countries. For this purpose an index is constructed which measures the similarity of investment...

Green technological progress bears a strong potential to alleviate climate change, but its utilization is contingent on factors which are by nature impossible to anticipate or predict. Developing stochastic optimisation models, we explore how the decision to invest in research and development...

Combining in-house research and work by leading academics, this report assesses how the crisis has impacted investment across the non-financial sector, in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), in infrastructure, and in R&D and innovation. It explains why and where investment has declined,...

We adapt a theoretical model from the goods trade literature to test whether banks with a comparative cost advantage are more likely to enter foreign markets by means of foreign direct investment. We combine detailed proprietary bank-level data on the international activities of all German banks...