This paper attempts to explain the link between corporate investments in different phases of the economic cycle and company financial distress. The data were derived from the Estonian Centre of Registers and Information Systems and contained the population of Estonian businesses from four...

<title>Abstract</title>This paper investigates the impact of leverage on labour productivity of companies operating in the Baltic countries, with a focus on differences between local and multinational companies. We employ a fixed effects regression model on company level data, covering the period from 2001 to...

We investigate the association between banks' credit expansion and loan loss reserves on a panel of banks from 11 new EU member countries from Central and Eastern Europe during 2004–2010. Unused committed credit lines capture the decline in banks' risk aversion being associated with a supply...

This paper considers the joint role of macroeconomic, structural and bank-specific factors in explaining the occurrence of banking problems in the nineteen Eastern European transition countries over the last decade. With data at the individual bank level we show, using a discrete time survival...

The present paper contributes to the research on the indicators that provide a warning of company failure by employing micro and macro variables within a framework of survival analysis using a sample of 0.4 million companies from the European Union (EU). The sensitivity of the results is checked...

The recent global financial turmoil increased bank interest spreads in Estonia to the highest levels recorded since the Russian crisis in 1998- 1999. The pure spread concept and the two-step estimation approach of Ho and Saunders (1981) have been used to decompose the interest spreads in...

This paper investigates whether there are systematic differences in the capital structure formation of local companies and subsidiaries of multinational companies (MNCs) operating in the Baltic States over the period from 2000 to 2008. The analysis is based on panel data estimation on a sample...

This paper examines patterns of firm survival in Estonia using a discrete time estimation approach with a complementary log-log hazard function. A firm is defined as sound if it meets the minimum capital requirement set by the law and distressed otherwise. Firms in default not only fall short of...

The recent global financial turmoil increased bank interest spreads in Estonia to the highest levels recorded since the Russian crisis in 1998-99. The pure spread concept and the two-step estimation approach of Ho and Saunders (1981) have been used to break down the interest spreads in Estonia....

Banking reform has proved to be one of the most problematic elements of economic transition in central and Eastern Europe. Therefore the paper considers the development of the Estonian banking sector and derives individual banks´ fragility scores during transition. To this end we use...