The "financing gap" measures the need of external funds for the corporate sector as the difference between gross "capital formation" and "savings". Taking advantage of the recent release of data in the ESA95 standard, this paper assembles a set of stylized facts about the corporate financing gap...

Theoretical literature suggests a variety of reasons why a public-private partnership (PPP)should exhibit higher costs of construction than traditionally procured public infrastructure projects. The bundling of construction and operation contracts in a PPP give the private partner greater...

In a Black-Scholes-Merton model of single name default, instability could be seen as the level of volatility that would trigger default, everything else equal. At a portfolio level, for instance comprising all credit liabilities of the corporate sector, potential for instability could be...

The paper explores the readiness of the Turkish banking sector for integration into the European Union. We address the issue from four different angles. First, we review the present structure and health of the sector, including the state of the regulatory framework, providing where possible a...

We examine the evolution of public investment and public capital stocks in Europe during the past three decades. Against this background, we employ an array of econometric techniques to assess the macroeconomic determinants of public investment, with a special focus on its long-term trend. We...

This paper offers an updated description of the macroeconomic and sectoral significance of PPPs in Europe, without assessing PPPs from a normative perspective. It shows that, over the past fifteen years, more than one thousand PPP contracts have been signed in the EU, representing a capital...

The paper is organised as follows: The first section reviews the recent trends in investment rates in South-Eastern Europe (SEE). The low level of investment in the region emerges clearly from this discussion. To explain the low investment rates, we then look at the other side of the...

We take stock of what is known about public investment in the member states of the European Union, old and new alike. The interesting features about the long-term evolution of public investment have been its downtrend in old EU member states, bar the cohesion countries, and its volatility in new...

This paper extends the Schure and Wagenvoort (1999) study, which considers economies of scale and efficiency in European banking, in a number of directions. Firstly, we introduce what we believe to be important improvements to estimating efficiency. Secondly, we examine more closely the...

The traditional econometric techniques for frontier models, namely the Stochastic Frontier Approach (SFA), the Thick Frontier Approach (TFA) and the Distribution Free Approach (DFA) have in common that they depend on a priori assumptions that are, whether feasible or not, difficult to test. This...