This paper identifies endogenous and exogenous indicators of firms' investment activity, and examine, in particular, the effect that these variables have in co-determining firms' investment decisions. Two channels of spillovers from sovereign risk to firms' capital expenditures are defined. The...

This paper analyzes the relationship between factor substitutability and the energy intensity of manufacturing firms. Specifically, we compare the degree of substitutability between the input factors capital, labor, energy, and material for firms with low, medium, and high energy cost shares...

The literature on macroeconomic agent-based models (MABMs) has gained growing attention since the early 2000s. Most MABMs dealing with market regulations have been focusing on the financial market. In contrast, only a small number of MABMs investigate the effects of labor market regulations. In...

Value at risk (VaR) has become a standard measure of portfolio risk over the last decade. It even became one of the corner stones in the Basel II accord about banks' equity requirements. Nevertheless, the practical application of the VaR concept suffers from two problems: how to estimate VaR and...

The convergence of estimators, e.g. maximum likelihood estimators, for increasing sample size is well understood in many cases. However, even when the rate of convergence of the estimator is known, practical application is hampered by the fact, that the estimator cannot always be obtained at...

The great financial turmoil that started 2007 has brought bank regulation back into the political debate. There is talk about imposing new regulations on banks and other financial intermediaries. Yet, we are not convinced that it is completely understood how the existing regulation affects...