This paper investigates the link between corporate debt and investment for a group of five peripheral euro area countries. Using firm-level data from 2005-2014, we postulate a non-linear corporate leverage-investment relationship and derive thresholds beyond which leverage has a negative and...

This paper analyses the implications of corporate indebtedness for investment following large economic shocks. The empirical analysis is based on a large Orbis-iBACH firm-level data set for euro area countries from 2005 to 2018. Our results suggest that investment of high-debt firms is...

This paper advances a novel hypothesis regarding the historical roots of labor emancipation. It argues that the decline of coercive labor institutions in the industrial phase of development has been an inevitable by-product of the intensification of capital-skill complementarity in the...

An analytical framework is developed to study the repercussions between endogenous capital- and labor-saving technical change and population aging. Following an intuition often attributed to Hicks (1932), I ask whether and how population aging affects the relative scarcity of factors of...

Large and sustained differences in marginal products of capital (MPKs) across countries are sharply at odds with the core implications of the neoclassical framework. Lucas (1990) and many subsequent studies have examined reasons for this MPK differential. In a recent contribution, Caselli and...

Capital estimates are widely used in economic growth and productivity studies, for profitability considerations and wealth accounting exercises. Yet the calculation of "capital" frequently receives only cursory attention, despite the challenges posed by conceptual difficulties, the complexity of...

Is investment constrained more by insecure property rights or by limited external finance? For five transition economies in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union we find that weak property rights limit the reinvestment of profits in startup ma nufacturing firms. Access to credit does not...

The corporate finance literature documents that managers tend to overinvest into physical assets. A number of theoretical contributions have aimed to explain this stylized fact, most of them focussing on a fundamental agency problem between shareholders and managers. The present paper shows that...

We quantify the role of financial factors behind the sluggish post-crisis performance of European firms. We use a firm-bank-sovereign matched database to identify separate roles for firm and bank balance sheet weaknesses arising from changes in sovereign risk and aggregate demand conditions. We...