This paper investigates the link between the optimal level of nonfinancial firms' leverage and macroeconomic uncertainty. We develop a structural model of a firm's value maximization problem that predicts that as macroeconomic un-certainty increases the firm will decrease its optimal level of...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the effect of revenue decentralization on the provision of infrastructure at the sub-national level. We estimate the effects of revenue decentralization and earmarked grant financing on the level of sub-national infrastructure investment in 20 European...

This paper studies the impact of credit rating agency (CRA) announcements on the value of the Euro and the yields of French, Italian, German and Spanish long-term sovereign bonds during the culmination of the Eurozone debt crisis in 2011-2012. The employed GARCH models show that CRA downgrade...

This paper investigates the determinants of liability maturity choice in emerging markets using a unique panel of 4,500 Ukrainian firms during the period 2000-2006. Our estimates confirm the importance of agency costs, liquidity, signaling, and taxes for the liability term structure of firms...

Economic disparities between the regions of the European Union are of constant concern both for policy and economic research. In this paper, we examine whether there are overlapping trends of regional development in the EU: overall convergence, on the one hand, and persistent or even increasing...

The paper studies the persistence of profit and its determinants in emerging markets. We apply Markov chain analysis, dynamic panel GMM estimation, and quantile regression techniques to a panel of approximately 3,000 Ukrainian companies. The empirical results show a moderate level of profit...

We examine firms' motivation to change their main bank and how this switch affects loans, interest payments and firm performance after switching. Applying treatment effect analysis on unique firm-bank matched Ukrainian data, we find that larger and highly leveraged companies are more likely to...

We provide new evidence on the impact of one severe weather shock on child height in Mongolia. Our focus is on the extremely harsh winter - locally referred to as dzud - of 2009/10, which caused more than 23 percent of the national livestock to perish. This resulted in a food insecurity...