This paper analyses the role of banks in financing SMEs in Britain and Germany. It applies a sociological institutionalist approach to understand how banks construct and manage risk, relating to SME business. The empirical analysis is based on the results of a comparative survey of a sample of...

Previous studies of Medicare’s prospective payment system for hospitals (PPS), introduced in 1983, evaluated only its first few years, using data collected during the hospital stay to control for patients’ health. We examine transitions among health care settings over a full decade following...

Zakat is one of the five pillars of Islam and can be understood as a form of religious duty, purifying one's wealth and at the same time functioning as a means to redistribute wealth to those in need. In Arabic, zakat means, among others, growth and purity (Dean and Khan 1997). In...

The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development clearly recognises that poverty is more than just the lack of a sufficient amount of income. However, some scholars argue that an income-based measure of poverty can sufficiently capture poverty in other dimensions. Unfortunately, the...

This paper extends the literature on bank capital structure by modeling capital structure as a function of important public policy and bank regulatory characteristics of the home country, as well as of bank-specific variables, country-level macroeconomic conditions, and country-level financial...

We analyse the consequences of starting a wage subsidised job, marginal employment, for unemployed workers. Marginal employment is a type of wage subsidy paid to unemployed workers and they do not lose their unemployment benefits if the wage is below a certain threshold. We ask if the unemployed...

We analyze how adding the shadow economy to official output figures affects technical efficiency. We find that this only slightly affects the ranking of efficiency scores, but increases average efficiency. Our results are robust to the functional form of the production technology and the...

Das institutionelle Arrangement eines Landes ist zu einer Standortfrage und zu einer Frage der langfristigen Wettbewerbsfähigkeit einer Ökonomie geworden . Ein stabiles und günstiges makroökonomisches Umfeld ist eine wesentliche Voraussetzung für erfolgreiche wirtschaftliche Tätigkeit von...

Considerable evidence suggests that enforcement efforts cannot fully explain the high degree of tax compliance. To resolve this puzzle of tax compliance several researchers have argued that citizens’ attitudes toward paying taxes defined as tax morale helps to explain the high degree of tax...