We reveal motivations of Chinese firms for issuing Seasoned Equity Offerings (SEO) by examining why firms change the use of SEO proceeds and how they use unspecified SEO proceeds. Using 533 SEOs issued by Chinese firms during 1999-2006, we find that firms do not use unspecified SEO proceeds on...

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...

Abstract We contribute to the debate on the interpretation of investment-cash flow sensitivities by including uncertainty measures in both a simple theoretical investment model and an empirical illustration for Dutch firm-level data. Using a slightly modified version of the Kaplan-Zingales...

The paper analyses the impact of age on the ranking of recorded popular songs in the Dutch Radio2 Top2000 chart in the years 1999-2013. We measure the competition between the loss of collective memory and nostalgia with respect to popular songs. Nostalgic feelings seem to be relevant to recorded...

We explore the determinants of the number of bank relations of listed Japanese firms in a unique data set covering 1982-1999. Japanese firms had about 7 long-term and 8 short-term bank loan relations on average. We present a statistical description of the bank relations in terms of size,...

This paper analyses whether societal norms help to explain cross-country differences in financial development. We analyze whether societal norms in addition to legal institutions have an impact on financial development. We address the implications of the inclusion of societal norms for the...

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 attention to...

We explain the development of stock markets by both legal and societal determinants and analyze the relevance of both determinants in the Levine-Zervos (1998) cross-sectional growth regressions. We argue that the legal indicators as developed by La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer and Vishny...

We model the development of world records of metric running events from the 100 meter dash to the marathon for men and women. First, we review methods to fit time-series curves of world records in general. We discuss methods to estimate curves and review candidate functional forms that fit the...

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...