On 16th November 2009, SUERF, CEPS and the Belgian Financial Forum coorganized a conference "Crisis management at cross-roads" in Brussels. All papers in the present volume are based on contributions at the conference and the SUERF Annual Lecture which followed the event.

This papers analyses how horizontal mergers affect innovation activities of the merged entity and its non-merging competitors. We develop an oligopoly model with heterogeneous firms to derive empirically testable implications. Our model predicts that a merger is more likely to be profitable in...

With this paper we present the first microeconometric analysis of the impact of a foreign acquisition on the target firms' access to finance. By using a large database of German firms we furthermore investigate for the first time the link between foreign ownership and access to finance in...

We consider a two-stage principal-agent model with limited liability in which a CEO is employed as agent to gather information about suitable merger targets and to manage the merged corporation in case of an acquisition. Our results show that the CEO systematically recommends targets with low...

The coalition of the willing and the breakthrough of the welfare state : the political history of the Danish people's pension / Klaus Petersen & Jørn Henrik Petersen -- From Bismarck to the new pension orthodoxy : the historical development of the pension system in Hungary / Dorottya Szikra --...