While expanding public investment can help filling infrastructure bottlenecks, scaling up too much and too fast often leads to inefficient outcomes. This paper rationalizes this outcome looking at the association between cost inflation and public investment in a large sample of road construction...

In this paper we claim that distance alone is a poor proxy for international transport costs in empirical studies. We model a manufacturing and a transport sector and let the level of manufacturing exports determine the demand for transport services. Above a particular trade level, transport...

Research findings of the latest round of the wiiw-GDN project on development in the Balkans are surveyed. Historical and structural deficiencies of development in the Balkan countries are discussed in detail with emphasis of the role of investment, integration, and structural and policy...

In this paper we claim that distance alone is a poor proxy for international transport costs in empirical studies. We model a manufacturing and a transport sector and let the level of manufacturing exports determine the demand for transport services. Above a particular trade level, transport...

An underinvestment problem arises if an additional investment project with positive net presentvalue increases only the market value of debt, but not of equity. As a way out the shift ofthe additional investment project and possibly also other projects to a subsidiary is considered.From the...

Anglo-Saxon countries have been successful in the 1990s concerning labor market performance compared to the former role models Germany and Japan. This reversal in relative economic performance might be related to idiosyncracies in financial markets with bank-based financial markets as in Germany...

We apply the accelerator principle to measure the functional efficiency of capital markets. We estimate the elasticity of capital with respect to output using a panel of firms across 44 countries, and compare the results with existing approaches. Furthermore, we correlate our measure with...

Business groups in emerging markets perform better than unaffiliated firms. One explanation is that business groups substitute some functions of missing institutions, for example, enforcing contracts. We investigate this by setting up a model where firms within the business group are connected...

Previous studies argued that low investment-cash flow sensitivities of German firms may be caused by dominance of public banking.The paper addresses this topic and applies a unique accounting dataset of German firms. Results from a dynamic panel data approach show that the dependence of...

The welfare effects of private equity transactions are debated controversially. We analyze the impact of expansion financing and buyouts by private equity investors on investment of portfolio firms in the UK and France - two countries with different financial systems. Unobserved heterogeneity...