This study surveys the academic and professional literature examining the privatisation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), with a focus on empirical studies. Privatisation has been instrumental in reducing state ownership in many countries and had a transforming effect on global stock markets,...

We investigate implications for the cost of capital in a model with agency conflicts between inside and outside shareholders, where the severity of agency costs depends on a parameter representing investor protection. Using firm-level data for Italy and Germany we find significant differences in...

China's economic growth has, hitherto, depended on its relative abundance of production labour and its increasingly secure investment environment. Within the next decade, however, China's labour force will begin to contract. This will set its economy apart from other developing Asian countries...

One consequence of the trade and technology driven increases in skill premia in the older industrial regions since the 1980s has been a perceived “skill shortage” in those regions, along with freer migration of skilled and professional workers from developing regions. While skilled migration...

This paper wants to assess the extent of financial integration in the European Union using the Feldstein-Horioka criterion applied to regional data over the 1995-2000 period. Our article highlights several important outcomes. First, we find evidence that there is no correlation between savings...

This paper empirically investigates the impact of exchange rate shocks on corporate investment. An intertemporal optimization model is developed in which an individual corporation in an open economy adjusts its capital stock according to the Tobinfs q, which represents the future stream of the...

This paper uses panel data for manufacturing firms from Lower Saxony to shed light on the micro-structure of investment dynamics. It looks at seven two-year periods from 1995/96 to 2001/02. Important findings include: Many firms invest in one of two years only. However, the largest part of...

We present evidence that an increase in investment as a share of GDP predicts a higher growth rate of output per worker, not only temporarily, but also in the steady state. These results are found using pooled annual data for a large panel of countries, using pooled data for non-overlapping...

Many macroeconomic models involve hybrid equations, in which some variables are a function of both their lags and their expected future value. The hybrid ``New Keynesian'' Phillips Curve is a prominent example. Estimates of such hybrid models have produced conflicting empirical results: Studies...