The prevailing view in the banking industry is that increased bank capital requirements drag down bank lending. This is because capital is assumed to impose higher funding costs on banks than debts. The leading scholarly view in finance maintains the contrary. We are able to present...

Theory suggests that the cross-border bank lending flow from rich countries to poor countries is facilitated when lending-related legal and social norms are shared and valued equally by both lenders and borrowers. According to this reasoning the fast adoption of Western-style democracy and...

Stylised facts suggest that there is some "spatial structure" in the dynamics of cross-border lending of Austrian regional banks that seems to be closely related to the eastward enlargement of the European Union. This short paper provides evidence that a stark space-related dependency of...

The fast adoption of Western-style democracy and market economy principles as established by EU standards by many of the Eastern European "transformation countries" since the early 1990s should have raised cross-border lending by banks based in "old" EU member countries to clients resident in...

In this paper we make an attempt to extend the WIFO trade-weighted exchange rate index (TWI_ER) by computing export-weighted exchange rate indices for eight Austrian manufacturing industries covering the period from 1995 to 2005. The TWI_ER by manufacturing industries improves upon the previous...

This paper conducts an in-depth analysis of the impact of acquisitions, initial public offerings and management buyouts on productivity and profitability of a large sample of Europe-based manufacturing companies covering the period from 1996 to 2005. At the center of our analysis is the...