In this paper we investigate how expected liquidation costs affect a firm's investment and financing decisions. We hypothesise that comovement of firm and industry sales measures such costs, which create a premium on external finance and make investment more sensitive to the availability of...

This paper investigates the determinants of commercial banks' own internal capital targets and potential sensitivity of these levels to the business cycle . World-wide results make clear that banks' own risk is only slightly dependent on the business cycle. Banks tend to hold substantial capital...

We use focused interviews with bank managers to analyse how multinational banks use internal capital markets to control their subsidiaries. It is found that foreign bank affiliates are strongly influenced by the capital allocation and credit steering mechanisms of the parent bank. Parent banks...

The empirical application of the financing constraints paradigm supports the joint hypothesis that con-strained firms can be identified and display a stronger sensitivity of investment to cash flow. This paradigm is increasingly criticized, because some proxy variables used to identify...

In the first part of this article we present a brief description of Dutch retail payment systems in terms of market structure and performance, usage of payment instruments, and corresponding tariff structures. Although it is con-cluded that the Dutch retail payment market as a whole showed...

When firms find that external finance is costly or rationed, they face financing constraints in their investment decisions. The financing constraints paradigm applies this idea empirically and supports the joint hypothesis that constrained firms can be identified and should display a stronger...

We study the implications of uncertainty for inflation targeting in a dynamic set-up. Using Svensson's inflation forecast targeting model, we compare the Brainard conservative principle to a more active monetary policy rule, derived from a two-step optimisation procedure. Our analysis points to...

This paper empirically investigates if insurers exhibited a flight home or flight to quality during the European sovereign debt crisis and other stages of the financial crisis. Our dataset consists of over sixty insurance companies, for which we separately observe trading behaviour and portfolio...

This paper assesses the determinants of market impact costs of institutional equity trades, using unique data from the world's second largest pension fund. We allow the impact of trade characteristics and market conditions on trading costs to depend on the level of trading costs itself and...

Often, a relatively small group of trades causes the major part of the trading costs on an investment portfolio. For the equity trades studied in this paper, executed by the world's second largest pension fund, we find that only 10% of the trades determines 75% of total market impact costs....