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...

This paper studies the association between a country's level of financial development and firms' employment growth. We employ an incomplete contract model for evaluating this association. The model proposes that a high level of financial development affects the employment of firms with low...

Soft budget constraints (SBCs) are a persistent feature of transition economies and have been blamed for i.a. a lack of fiscal consolidation and sluggish growth. EU eastward enlargement has - among other things - been conditioned on tackling SBCs. This paper analyzes such outside conditionality...

This study examines the relation between corporate governance practices measured by Transparency Disclosure Index (TDI) and dividend policy in Poland. Our empirical approach, constructs measures of the quality of the corporate governance for 110 non-financial companies listed on Warsaw Stock...

This paper investigates the determinants of liability maturity choice in transition markets. We formulate a model of firm value maximization that describes managers' choice of optimal debt structure. The theoretical predictions are tested using a unique panel of 4,300 Ukrainian firms during the...

The paper studies the persistence of profit and its determinants in emerging markets. We apply Markov chain analysis, dynamic panel GMM estimation, and quantile regression techniques to a panel of approximately 3,000 Ukrainian companies. The empirical results show a moderate level of profit...

In the era of Basel II a powerful tool for bankruptcy prognosis is vital for banks. The tool must be precise but also easily adaptable to the bank's objections regarding the relation of false acceptances (Type I error) and false rejections (Type II error). We explore the suitability of Smooth...

In this paper we investigate whether small-scale businesses face financial constraints that affect their survival. We develop a model of moral hazard in which financial constraints arise endogenously. The model predicts that higher private assets relax financial constraints and have a positive...

We estimate firms' cash flow sensitivity of cash to empirically test how the financial system's structure and activity level influence their financial constraints. For this purpose we merge Almeida, Campello and Weisbach (2004), a pathbreaking new design for evaluating a firm's financial...

We examine why firms change their main bank and how this affects loans, interest payments and firm performance after switching. Using unique firm-bank matched Ukrainian data, the treatment effect estimates suggest that more transparent and riskier companies are more likely to switch their main...