The Berle-Means problem - information and incentive asymmetries disrupting relations between knowledgeable managers and remote investors - has remained a durable issue engaging researchers since the 1930's. However, the Berle-Means paradigm - widely-dispersed, helpless investors facing strong,...

This paper analyses the impact of share ownership, creditorship and networking by financial institutions on the performance of 94 Dutch non-financial firms in the period 1992-1996. We find a nonlinear relationship between firm performance and ownership by banks. Because of various defense...

This paper examines the responses of private consumption, residential investment, and business investment in 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...

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 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...

We explore the determinants of the number of long-term bank relations of listed Japanese firms using a unique data set covering the period 1982-1999. Japanese listed firms have about seven long-term bank loan relations on average, but show a large variation around the average. We analyze the...

We analyze the impact of international R&D spillovers on recipient countries in terms of social and private returns. We divide the aggregate R&D stock by the business, government and education sectors and examine the impact on Total Factor Productivity. We endogenize the accrual of the R&D...

We analyze the role of forward-looking indicators, like the IFO business climate indicator and asset prices, in German monetary transmission. We show that the use of both the IFO indicator and asset prices improves the performance and interpretation of a Vector AutoRegression (VAR) model of...

The 2008 Nobel prize for economics was awarded to Paul Krugman for three papers - Krugman (1979, 1980, 1991). In this paper we illustrate that, indeed, these three papers are closely connected. We present - a summary of - the papers using a unified framework. Central in the discussion is the...

In explaining the uneven spatial distribution of economic activity, urban economics and new economic geography (NEG) dominate recent research in economics. A main difference between these two approaches is that NEG stresses the role of spatial linkages whereas urban economics does not do so. We...