While it is generally maintained that earnings management can occur to inform as well as to mislead, evidence that earnings management informs has been scarce, and evidence that credibility increases with signal costliness inexistent. We provide evidence that firms use discretion over financial...

This study analyses productive efficiency in banking and scale and scope economies using stochastic frontier analysis. The European banking sector underwent great changes during the period under study (1995-2000), featuring a marked increase in competition. Empirical results suggest that...

This article studies the impact of monetary policy on real economy in Europe through a particular transmission mechanism: the credit channel. The credit channel is based on the existence of information asymmetries in financial markets that change the agents financing conditions. According to the...

This paper analyses the determinants of the investment decision by focusing on the firms subjective judgments about the impact of some economic factors. This work uses data from the INSEEs business surveys on investment in the industry, over the period 1991-2002. In October, these data contain...

This paper proposes an indirect inference (Gourieroux, Monfort and Renault, 1993; Smith, 1993) estimation method for a large class of dynamic equilibrium models. Our approach is based on the observation that the econometric structure of these systems naturally generates auxiliary equilibria that can...