Corporate tax reforms carried out in EU countries since 1980 entail lower statutory tax rates and reductions in generous tax depreciation provisions. Several countries including the UK have reduced tax rates for SMEs. This study compares incentive effects of such reforms on the SMEs’...

Consumption risk sharing among U.S. federal states increases in booms and decreases in recessions. We find that small firms' access to credit markets plays an important role in explaining this stylized fact: business cycle fluctuations in aggregate risk sharing are more pronounced in states in...

The paper investigates the survival of newly created small and medium enterprises in Brazilian manufacturing taking as reference the 1996-2005 period. The econometric analysis relies on time-varying version of the proportional hazard rate model that controls for unobserved heterogeneity. The...

Following the collapse of planning, new small and medium-sized firms rapidly emerged in all transition economies. Using firm level data, we investigate the interaction between the widespread opportunities for new business activities such firms faced and their business environment. The business...

Using a novel way to identify relationship and transaction banks, we study how banks' lending techniques affect funding to SMEs over the business cycle. For 21 countries we link the lending techniques that banks use in the direct vicinity of firms to these firms' credit constraints at two...

Building on a new data set which is combined from national micro-data bases, we highlight differences in the structure of migrants to four countries, viz. France, Germany, the UK and the US, which receive a substantial share of all immigrants to the OECD world. Looking at immigrants by source...

Using data from the 2006 wave of the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), this paper analyzes how a minimum wage affects employment, wage inequality, public expenditures, and aggregate income in the low-wage sector. It is shown that a statutory minimum wage of EUR 7.50 per hour would cost...

This paper investigates whether a nation's contingent value of hosting a mega-event depends on past experience with implied public goods benefits for its residents. Applying data from an ex-ante and ex-post query based on contingent valuation methods, we use the FIFA World Cup 2006 as a natural...

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...

The paper aims at assessing discrete complementarities in innovation policies in the context of the Brazilian industry in 2003. The paper considers the approach advanced by Mohnen and and Röller [European Economic Review, 2005] that focuses on supermodularity and submodularity tests for...