This paper analyses the role of bank-related constraints in explaining the sharp slowdown in bank lending to non-financial corporations in Germany during the recent financial crisis. We use a panel approach based on a unique data set which matches the individual responses of the banks...

This paper analyzes the effects of geographical proximity and agglomeration of FDIs (foreign direct investments) on domestic firms in the privatized glass sector in the Czech Republic. The motivation for this research is based on the scant evidence in Central and Eastern Europe of the effects of...

This article questions the slope homogeneity in a gravity equation and proposes a partially heterogeneous framework for its estimation using panel data. We suggest to employ K-mean clustering to group countries according to the gravity equation variables. Further, the gravity model is estimated...

The paper applies the gravity model of international trade in its analysis of German exports. The added value of our research is derived from the innovative shift in focus from the traditional gravity model specifications to the national level in order to interpret its estimations in a...

The results generally confirm that Czech trade is oriented towards European countries and determined primarily by key economic factors of domestic and foreign GDP. The institutional variables remain largely insignificant, except corruption due tothe counterintuitive result that a higher...

The purpose of this paper is to examine Austrian foreign trade and estimate the country’s export function. The analysis is based on the gravity model of trade in the log-log form, augmented by additional variables in order to control for the impact of institutions on decision-making. Our panel...

The Czech Republic has been a successful recipient of foreign direct investment over recent years. Therefore, it is important to understand the decisions made by foreign investors where to place their investments and how to decide about their location between alternative industries. The aim of...

The Italian and German banking systems shared similar characteristics early in the 1990s but have evolved in different directions since then: Italy privatized its publicly-owned banks while Germany has maintained a large share of state-owned savings banks. Contemporaneously, banks in both...

German banks experienced a merger wave throughout the 1990s. However, the success of bank mergers remains a continuous matter of debate. In this paper we suggest a taxonomy as how to evaluate post-merger performance on the basis of cost efficiency (CE). We categorise mergers a success that...

We analyze the stability of efficiency rankings of German universal banks between 1993 and 2004. First, we estimate traditional efficiency scores with stochastic cost and alternative profit frontier analysis. Then, we explicitly allow for different risk preferences and measure efficiency with a...