Informed capital is a crucial ingredient to a well-functioning market for start-up finance, especially in times of difficult market conditions. For bank-based systems, the question regarding which investors actually supply informed capital has not yet been answered. To fill this gap, we conduct...

The paper seeks to add to the existing literature on aggregate and private savings by focusing on transition economies. We use panel data over the period 1989-1998 and estimate a fixed-effects model. In Central Eastern European Countries, aggregate and private savings are driven by almost the...

An unexpected increase in life expectancy has implications for private pensions (annuities). These can be offset by reducing pension payments, cross-subsidization of the pension payments, risk-taking of insurance companies or combining these policies. An empirical study of the German market of...

Multiplicative growth processes that are subject to random shocks often have a skewed distribution of outcomes. In a number of incentivized laboratory experiments we show that a large majority of participants either strongly underestimate skewness or ignore it completely. Participants...

This article investigates the understandings and perceptions of (micro)insurance among low-income people in southern Ghana, using evidence from four focus group discussions. It analyzes how the focus group participants think about various types of insurance - among them a micro life insurance...

Competition is claimed to be beneficial in development projects promoting micro and small enterprise finance although there are still some doubts whether these loans can be developed into a profitable business. Actually nothing is known about how many MSE banking units optimally should be...

Recent contributions to the empirical analysis of the relationship between financial system development and economic growth found that an exogenous component of financial system development causes economic growth, is a good predictor of growth and that its growth impact is relatively large. In...

We examine the impact of bank competition and institutional factors on net firm entry in a sample of European manufacturing industries over the 1995-2006 period. Taking into account industry differences in the need for external finance, we find that bank competition helps firm entry. In...

Information asymmetries can severely limit cross-border border expansion of banks. When a bank enters a new market, it has incomplete information about potential new clients. Such asymmetries are reduced by credit registers, which distribute financial data on bank clients. We investigate the...

We examine the impact of bank competition and institutional factors on net firm entry in a sample of European manufacturing industries over the 1995-2006 period. Taking into account industry differences in the need for external finance, we find that bank competition helps firm entry. In...