After publishing its first report in September 1997, the Own Funds Working Group, in agreement with the European Committee of Central Balance Sheet Offices, decided to continue its work in order to gain a better understanding of the differences in financing structures between countries. To this...

The years following the Second World War were those of the greatest economic growth that Europe had ever seen. If the countries of the Iberian Peninsula, neutral in the conflict and ruled by dictatorial regimes, enjoyed that growth and had participated in the convergence phenomenon, Ireland,...

The years following the Second World War were those of the greatest economic growth that Europe had ever seen. If the countries of the Iberian Peninsula, neutral in the conflict and ruled by dictatorial regimes, enjoyed that growth and had participated in the convergence phenomenon, Ireland,...

Most opportunistic-type models of political business cycles tend to posit a given objective for incumbents: maximisation of re-election chances. Though taking an opportunistic view too, we suggest a new explanation for a fiscal policy cycle: the incumbent’s concern with her own welfare in...

This paper compares the out-of-sample forecasting accuracy of five classes of time series models for market shares of the six most important Portuguese car market competitors over differents horizons. As representative time series models I employ a random-walk with drift (Naive), a univariate...

Most of economic literature has presented its analysis under the assumption of homogeneous capital stock composition. However, capital composition differs across countries. What has been the pattern of capital composition associated with World economies? I make an exploratory statistical...

This paper seeks empirically to identify the determinants of the very small firms’ financial leverage. This is important because both these enterprises have been under-researched and research in the area has been troubled by samples biased towards very large enterprises. Results support...