In the programming period 2007-2013, the European Structural and Investment Fund (ESIF) invested €237 million in Slovak hospitals. We investigate whether this injection of additional funds has improved the quality of healthcare in the targeted hospitals. As a measure of quality, we use the...

Banks entering an emerging market face a lot of uncertainty about the risks involved in lending. We use a unique unbalanced panel of nearly 700 short-term loans made to SMEs in Slovakia between January 2000 and June 2005. Of the loans granted, on average 6.0 per cent of the firms defaulted....

The current crisis raises the question whether loans to SMEs in emerging markets are inherently more risky. We use a unique unbalanced panel of nearly 700 loans made to SMEs in Slovakia between 2000 and 2005. Several probit and panel probit models show that liquidity and profitability factors...