To quickly adapt to technological change and developments, and thus remain competitive, firms increasingly resort to the use of external technology. This paper investigates whether and to what extent the acquisition of external disembodied technology affects the efficiency and productivity in...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the effect of revenue decentralization on the provision of infrastructure at the sub-national level. We estimate the effects of revenue decentralization and earmarked grant financing on the level of sub-national infrastructure investment in 20 European...

This paper studies the impact of credit rating agency (CRA) announcements on the value of the Euro and the yields of French, Italian, German and Spanish long-term sovereign bonds during the culmination of the Eurozone debt crisis in 2011-2012. The employed GARCH models show that CRA downgrade...

The paper studies the persistence of profit and its determinants in emerging markets. We apply Markov chain analysis, dynamic panel GMM estimation, and quantile regression techniques to a panel of approximately 3,000 Ukrainian companies. The empirical results show a moderate level of profit...

This paper links banking systems development to the colonial and legal history of African countries. Specifically, we investigate the impact of differing legal traditions on the development of existing investor and creditor protection, and on African banking systems. Based on a sample of 40...

We examine whether monetary transmission during the financial and sovereign debt crisis was dominated by the cost channel or by the demand-side channel effect. We use two approaches to track down the potential pass through of changes in the monetary policy rate to those in consumer prices....

Using the 2007 Mannheim innovation survey, we investigate whether family firms are more financially constrained than other firms and how this affects both innovation input as well as innovation outcomes such as market and firm novelties or process innovations. Based on the CDM framework,...

Our study provides evidence for firms' evaluation of location quality. We use a 2004 survey of 6,000 East German firms that contained questions on the importance and assessment of 15 different location factors ranging from closeness to customers and suppliers, transport infrastructure, and...

This paper sheds new light on how African countries' legal systems and institutions influence the governance and stability of their banks. We find that institutional factors, in particular the legal family of origin, political stability, contract enforcement and strength of investor protection...

This study analyses how liquidity risk affects bonds' yield spreads after controlling for credit risk, bond-specific characteristics and macroeconomic variables. Using two liquidity estimates, LOT liquidity and the bid-ask spread, we find that, in particular, the LOT liquidity measure has...