Traditionally banks have used securitization for expanding credit and thus their profitability. It has been well documented that, at least before the 2008 crisis, many banks were keeping a high proportion of the securities that they created on their own balance-sheets. Those securities retained...

We examine evidence for a systematic underperformance of Germany’s state-owned banks in the current financial crisis and study if the bank losses can be traced to the quality of bank governance. For this purpose, we examine the biographical background of 593 supervisory board members in the 29...

We study differences in the price paid for liquidity across banks using price data at the individual bank level. Unique to this paper, we also have data on individual banks’ reserve requirements and actual reserve holdings, thus allowing us to gauge the extent to which a bank is short or long...

This paper assesses sources of productivity spillovers in China’s electric and electronic manufacturing industry using a rich panel data-set of 25,360 firms observed over the period 2004-2007. This industry is characterized by its important reliance on technology. In particular, the paper...

This paper provides an overview of the recent literature on estimation and inference in large panel data models with cross-sectional dependence. It reviews panel data models with strictly exogenous regressors as well as dynamic models with weakly exogenous regressors. The paper begins with a...

This paper extends the Common Correlated Effects (CCE) approach developed by Pesaran (2006) to heterogeneous panel data models with lagged dependent variable and/or weakly ex-ogenous regressors. We show that the CCE mean group estimator continues to be valid but the following two conditions must...

This paper formulates a structural empirical model of heterogeneous firms whose workers exhibit fair-wage preferences, leading to a link between a firm’s operating profits and wages of workers employed by this firm. We estimate the parameters of the model in a data-set of five European...

An emerging literature on the geography of bohemians argues that a region’s lifestyle and cultural amenities explain, at least partly, the unequal distribution of highly qualified people across space, which in turn, explains geographic disparities in economic growth. However, to date, there...