We examine evidence for a systematic underperformance of Germany's state-owned banks in the current financial crisis and study if the bank losses can be traced to the quality of bank governance. For this purpose, we examine the biographical background of 593 supervisory board members in the 29...

Why does venture capital work in some countries but not in others? This clinical study of the first German venture capital firm examines the difficulties of creating a venture capital market in a bank-based financial system. The analysis identifies the problem of creating appropriate governance...

Is real investment fully determined by fundamentals or is it sometimes affected by stock market misvaluation? We introduce three new tests that: measure the reaction of investment to sales shocks for firms that may be overvalued; use Fama-MacBeth regressions to determine whether overinvestment...

In Germany, the employment response to the post-2007 crisis has been muted compared to other industrialized countries. Despite a large drop in output, employment has hardly changed. In this paper, we analyze the determinants of German firms' labor demand during the crisis using a firm-level...

Multinational companies can exploit the tax advantage of debt more aggressively than national companies by shifting debt from affiliates in low tax countries to affiliates in high tax countries. Previous papers have either omitted internal debt or external debt from the analysis. We are the...

We analyze the long-term effects of firm break-up and ownership change on corporate performance. Our analysis is based on a unique data set for a large number of Czech firms spanning the period 1996–2005. We employ a propensity score matching procedure to deal with endogeneity problems. Our...

This paper proposes a model where heterogeneous firms choose whether to undertake R&D or not. Innovative firms are more productive, have larger investment opportunities and lower own funds for necessary tangible continuation investments than non-innovating firms. As a result, they are...

We examine the impacts of both domestic and international financial market development on R&D intensities in 22 manufacturing industries in 18 OECD countries for the period 1990-2003. We take account of such industry characteristics as the need for external financing and the amount of tangible...

Shipping goods internationally is risky and takes time. To allocate risk and to finance the time gap between production and sale, a range of payment contracts is utilized. I study the optimal choice between these payment contracts considering one shot transactions, repeated transactions and...

We analyze how interactions between corporate taxation and corporate governance affect shareholder capital. Using a model with strategic interaction between managers and outside shareholders, we hypothesize that, while an increase in the corporate tax rate decreases shareholder capital, an...