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...

The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the causal relationships between defence spending and economic growth using the Toda-Yamamoto approach to Granger causality test in the case of selected NATO countries for the period of 1949-2006. NATO countries spend biggest proportion of defence...

This paper examines the relationship between corruption and public debt in 106 countries. Results suggest that corruption leads to an increase in public debt. We also investigate if the effect of corruption on pblic debt is increased by government expenditure, the shadow economy and military...

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...