The interrelationship between financial constraints and firm activity is a hotly debated issue. The way firms cope with financial constraints is fundamental to the analysis of monetary transmission, of financial stability and of growth and development. The CBI Industrial Trends Survey contains...

Germans are still very fond of using cash. Of all direct payment transactions, cash accounts for an astounding 82% in terms of number, and for 58% in terms of value. With a new and unique dataset that combines transaction information with survey data on payment behaviour of German consumers, we...

Standard transaction cost arguments can only partially explain why the share of cash transactions is still high in many countries. This paper shows that consumers' desire to monitor liquidity is one of the reasons. Consumers make use of a distinctive feature of cash - a glance into one's pocket...

The Panel on Household Finances (PHF) is a new panel survey on household finances and wealth in Germany conducted by the Deutsche Bundesbank. It covers the balance sheets, pension claims, savings, incomes and work histories of households, together with some information on consumption patterns,...

This paper aims to shed light on some of the major allocative consequences of financial market bubbles. In March 1997, the Neuer Markt in Germany opened. Six years later, in June 2003, it closed forever. In the interim period lay the spectacular rise and fall of the first and most important...

This paper uses a large panel of survey data on German firms in the manufacturing sector to analyse the effects of financing constraints for investors in general and for innovative firms in particular. Survey data with information on financing conditions are potentially a valuable tool that...

The impact of uncertainty on firms? investment outlays is subject to an ongoing debate. Theory identifies several channels. Irreversibility, financing constraints and risk aversion make a negative relationship between uncertainty and investment likely. On the other hand, the ability of firms to...

The interpretation of the significant relation between business investment spending and cash flow has been controversial. A large body of research has found that investment/cash flow sensitivities are higher for financially constrained firms. This fundamental result underlying the finance...

We present a comparable set of results on the monetary transmission channels on firm investment for the four largest euro-area countries (Germany, France, Italy and Spain). With particularly rich micro datasets for each country containing over 215,000 observations from 1985 to 1999, we explore...

This paper proposes a new framework for studying the effects of monetary policy on business investment. Important ambiguities with the modeling of investment dynamics and interactions between real and financial decisions suggest modeling investment spending as a VAR. Based on a panel of...