In a constantly changing economic environment a country's ability to undertake institutional reforms is crucial to maintain economic growth and to promote the welfare of its citizens. A wide range of determinants for institutional reforms have been identified. However, the impact of trust on...

Monitoring by institutional investors can act as an important mechanism to promote firm innovation. By investigating Chinese listed firms' patenting between 2002 and 2011, we find that the presence of institutional investors enhances firm innovation. Consistent with the monitoring view, we...

Finance theory does not provide a comprehensive framework for explaining risk management within the imperfect financial environment in which firms operate. Corporate managers, however, rank risk management as one of their most important objectives. Therefore, it is not surprising that papers on...

Cross-border investments represent a substantial share of venture capital activities. We use a new and comprehensive dataset on worldwide investments to analyze the internationalization of venture capital financing. Our results from the perspectives of (i) venture capitalists, (ii) portfolio...

This paper gives an overview over corporate governance and banking regulation in Germany. Particular attention is put on legal and regulatory changes that were made in response to the financial market crisis. The paper shows that the changes mainly focus on the remuneration of managers and on...

In this paper, a new approach to disclose the impact of politics on economic growth is presented: we use data derived from content analysis of party manifestos as measures of party preferences. In a panel of 23 OECD countries, we detect a positive impact of party support for various...