Royal Ahold (Koninklijke Ahold NV) was one of the major success stories in the 1990s and is one of the major failures, suffering a complete meltdown, in 2003.We investigate the strategy, accounting transparency and corporate governance of Ahold; elements which jointly drive the firm s performance...

The purpose of this paper is to gather evidence on the success of market forces in promoting investor interests through self-regulation.Corporate governance is a complex mechanism design problem that is both economic and legal/political based.As such there is great interest in whether (and when)...

Using a novel way to identify relationship and transaction banks, we study how banks’ lending techniques affect funding to SMEs over the business cycle. For 21 countries we link the lending techniques that banks use in the direct vicinity of firms to these firms’ credit constraints at two...

Abstract: We study the international transmission of shocks from the banking to the real sector during the global financial crisis. For identification, we use matched bank-firm level data, including many small and medium-sized firms, in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. We find that...

Abstract: The spatial survival models typically impose frailties, which characterize unobserved heterogeneity, to be spatially correlated. This specification relies highly on a pre-determinate covariance structure of the errors. However, the spatial effect may not only exist in the unobserved...

Abstract: This paper considers spatial autoregressive (SAR) binary choice models in the context of panel data with fixed effects, where the latent dependent variables are spatially correlated. Without imposing any parametric structure of the error terms, this paper proposes a smoothed spatial...

Abstract: The identification of parameters in a nonseparable single-index models with correlated random effects is considered in the context of panel data with a fixed number of time periods. The identification assumption is based on the correlated random-effect structure: the distribution of...