We test whether firms with a single bank are better shielded from loss of credit and investment cuts in periods of adverse cash flow shocks than firms with multiple bank relationships. Our estimates of the cash flow sensitivity of investment show that both types of firms are equally subject to...

Assessing the impacts of bank mergers on small firms requires separating borrowers with single versus multiple banking relationships and distinguishing the three alternatives of "staying," "dropping," and "switching" of relationship. Single-relationship borrowers who "switch" to another bank...

This paper discusses macroeconomic and monetary policy-making at the European Commission, covering the period from the Rome Treaties to the Hague Summit. It is based on an analysis of public documents, archival research and interviews with former policy-makers. The paper starts with an overview...

Anglo-American stock markets are much larger than their continental counterparts. Does investor protection and governance explain these differences? Using UK data, we examine four different forms of intervention which are suppose to promote good governance: takeovers, independent directors,...

This article aims at setting forth the development of venture capital in Belgium. To that end, the situation is compared with the one prevailing in the whole of Europe and particularly in some neighbouring countries: Germany, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. In a first part the...

This paper aims at assessing the relationship between the possible existence of financial constraints and the decisions of Belgian private firms as regards their investments in both capital and R&D investments over the last decade. The main system GMM estimates from the error-correction...

Firms' incentives to join other firms to collectively apply for a unique loan is empirically studied in this paper. When several firms jointly apply for a unique loan an association of firms is created. We identify the associations that had access to credit in Belgium over the period 2001-2011...

Theory offers conflicting predictions on whether and how lenders' sectoral specialization would affect firms' innovation activities. We show that the sign and magnitude of this effect vary with the degree of "asset overhang" across sectors, which is the risk that a new technology has negative...

The paper adds a moral hazard problem between banks and depositors as in Gertler and Karadi (2011) to a DSGE model with a costly state verification problem between entrepreneurs and banks as in Bernanke, Gertler and Girlchrist (1999, BGG). This modification amplifies the response of the external...