We provide the first cross-country evidence of the effect of investment by private equity firms on innovation, focusing on a sample of European countries and using Kortum and Lerner's (2000) empirical methodology. Using an 18-country panel covering the period 1991-2004, we study how private...

Using a comprehensive database of European firms, we study how private equity affects the rate of firm entry. We find that private equity investment benefits new business incorporation, especially in industries with naturally higher entry rates and R&D intensity. A two standard deviation...

Cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) sharply increased over the last two decades. It is often pointed out that cross-border capital reallocation is partly the result of financial liberalization policies, government policies and regional agreements. In this paper, we identify some of the...

This paper studies the bilateral drivers of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) between European banks. Two findings document that banks use M&A as a device to leverage their expertise rather than to diversify. (i) Following the literature on matrimonial matching by using a binary logit model, the...

Innovative firms with good ideas may still struggle to fine-tune them to the stage where they can attract outside funding. We conduct a five-country randomized experiment that tests the impact of an investment readiness program. Firms then pitched their ideas to independent judges. The program...

We study empirically the macroeconomic effects of an explicit de jure quantitative goal for monetary policy. Quantitative goals take three forms: exchange rates, money growth rates, and inflation targets. We analyze the effects on inflation of both having a quantitative target, and of hitting a...

This paper shows how the problem of mean-downside risk portfolio allocation can be cast in terms of penalized least squares (PLS). The penalty is given by a power function of the returns below a certain threshold. We derive the asymptotic properties of the PLS estimator, allowing for possible...

We provide a methodology to disentangle the long-run relation between variables from their own dynamics. Macroeconomic and aggregate financial series have a high degree of inertia. If this persistence is not properly accounted for, spurious correlations will give rise to paradoxes. Our procedure...

In recent years, demutualized stock exchanges have been increasingly engaging in M&A and alliance activities. To examine the effect of these growth strategies on exchange shareholders' value creation, we focus on 14 public stock exchanges and investigate their short-run share price responses to...