Did ICT firms behave very differently from non-ICT firms during the global ICT boom-bust cycle on the stock markets? To answer this question we analyze the financial behavior of a sample of North-American and Western European firms during 1991-2002. We document that ICT firms are indeed what...

This paper conducts a transatlantic comparison of market timing effects on corporate capital structures, using some 45,000 observations on US, UK, and continental European firms. We confirm the empirical regularity that leverage and historical market-to-book ratios connect negatively in the US,...

This study presents empirical evidence on the influence of sponsoring companies on the funding and portfolio allocation of pension funds, an issue on which most extant literature is theoretical. We use a unique microdataset of 550 Dutch defined benefit company pension funds and 100 sponsoring...

We investigate the capital structure of 350 Dutch insurers during the period 1995-2005. Our main findings are: (1) a small company size, a mutual organisation, high profitability, large equity investments, and being a fire insurer, all contribute to higher solvency margins; (2) minimum solvency...

This empirical study revisits the determinants of firms' capital structures. The main focus thereby is onthe 'market timing theory', according to which the current level of the capital structure is the cumulative outcome of past attempts to `time the market', i.e. issuing shares when equity is...

In this paper we analyze a model of consumption and investment when preferences are loss averse around a habit level and investment yields an uncertain return. Loss aversion is the most natural way of modeling the presence of a habit as it explicitly models aversion to below-habit consumption....

This paper considers empirical tests for the contagion of financial crises that address the endogeneity of contagion by using instrumental variable estimation techniques. Two complications in the application to contagion are that the regression model is potentially incoherent and that it...

In this paper we discuss tests for residual cross section dependence in nonlinear panel data models. The tests are based on average pair-wise residual correlation coefficients. In nonlinear models, the definition of the residual is ambiguous and we consider two approaches: deviations of the...

This paper focuses on the financing of banking supervision. Countries are classified according to who finances banking supervision the tax payer and/or the supervised industry -, and how the budget and fees are determined. We show that funding regimes differ across countries. Public funding is...

This paper is the first that applies a new measure of competition, the Boone indicator, to the banking industry. This approach is able to measure competition of bank market segments, such as the loan market, whereas many well-known measures of competition can consider the entire banking market...