This paper examines the response of the economies of 11 EU countries, Japan, and the United States to shocks in housing and equity prices. The effects are assessed with a Structural Vector Auto Regressive (SVAR) model, and four key findings emerge. First, the impacts of asset price shocks are...

We show by means of a bank relationship model that after monetary policy tightening, public firms are more likely to decrease their demand for bank loans than private firms, which are typically more dependent on bank credit and benefit more from relationship lending. In order to test this...

We analyze the decision to participate and performance at the Modern Olympic Summer Games at the country level. We use an unbalanced panel of 118 countries over all 24 editions of the Summer Games since 1896. The main focus of the paper is on economic, geographic and demographic determinants of...

Abstract By using data from a survey amongst a panel of Dutch firms we investigate whether the investment-uncertainty relationship depends on the size of the firm. We find that uncertainty has a positive effect on investment of small firms, whereas it is negative for large firms. There are...

This paper studies the determinants of capital structure choice of Dutch firms. Our main objective is to investigate whether and to what extent the main capital structure theories can explain capital structure choice of Dutch firms. A better understanding of the capital structure determinants in...

Abstract We analyse the development of world records speed skating from 1893 to 2000 for both men and women. The historical data show that it is likely that the relation between skating speed and distance of the various events is non-linear and converges to a limit value. We pay special...

Abstract This paper analyses the role of human capital as a hedge against future unexpected changes in consumption of nontradable goods. We show, in line with Baxter-Jermann (1997) that human capital aggra- vates the home country bias, although we a lower increase of the bias based on an...

This paper analyzes the impact of aging on long-run endurance. We analyze the determinants of running speed on distances from 5K to the marathon. We model running speed as a function of distance, age, and sex. We find evidence for interaction between age and sex, but not between distance and...

This paper investigates the effect of uncertainty on economic growth. We construct measures of export uncertainty, government policy uncertainty and price uncertainty to augment a growth model, and using econometric techniques we test for robustness of the effects of these measure on economic...