The paper evaluates the quality of the German national accounting data (GDP and its use-side components) as measured by the magnitude and dispersion of the forecast/ revision errors. It is demonstrated that government consumption series are the least reliable, whereas real GDP and real private...

The paper analyzes factors that influence the adoption of e-learning and gives an example of how to forecast technology adoption based on a post-hoc predictive segmentation using a classification and regression tree (CART). We find strong evidence for the existence of technological...

It is difficult to test the prediction that future career prospects create implicit effort incentives because researchers cannot randomly “assign” career prospects to economic agents. To overcome this challenge, we use data from professional soccer, where employees of the same club face...

This paper examines the impact of the recent global financial crisis on the cost of debt capital (syndicated loans) in a leading emerging market, namely China, using difference-in-differences and GARCH approaches. Before the crisis China adopted banking reforms allowing entry of foreign banks...

In developing and transition economies, microlending has become an effective instrument for providing micro businesses with the necessary financial resources to launch operations. In the industrialized countries, with their highly developed banking systems, however, there has been ongoing debate...

This study assesses how banking sector integration and especially cross-border lending affect macroeconomic stability. I use a two-country general equilibrium model with heterogeneous banks that are hit by idiosyncratic shocks. According to the concept of granularity, idiosyncratic shocks to...

An expanding body of literature has addressed the question of the economic impact terrorist attacks have. A part of this literature has focused on the impact recent major terrorist hits had on financial markets. The question addressed by this paper is to what extent markets' reaction to major...

Does the mere presence of big banks affect macroeconomic outcomes? In this paper, we develop a theory of granularity (Gabaix, 2011) for the banking sector, introducing Bertrand competition and heterogeneous banks charging variable markups. Using this framework, we show conditions under which...

This paper estimates ordered logit and probit regression models for bank ratings which also include a country index to capture country-specific variation. The empirical findings provide support to the hypothesis that the individual international bank ratings assigned by Fitch Ratings are...

This study assesses the relative performance of Greek equity funds employing a non-parametric method, specifically Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Using an original sample of cost and operational attributes we explore the effect of each variable on funds' operational efficiency for an...