Why are some financial crises associated with political crises and some are not? Does political instability cause financial fragility or the other way around? What are the implications of political distortions for policy in countries experiencing financial turmoil? This paper studies these and...

The transmission process from policy-controlled interest rates to bank lending rates deserves reconsideration owing to the implementation of the European Monetary Union (EMU) in 1999. Additional attention to the subject in Austria is due to several large banks which, in 2002, have been charged...

Trade credits are an important financing tool for internationally active firms. This is surprising, as trade credits are generally more expensive than bank credits and thus a costly substitute for bank financing. In this paper, we investigate the relation between trade credits and bank credits...

Internationally active firms rely intensively on trade credits even though they are considered particularly expensive. This phenomenon has been little explored so far. Our theoretical analysis shows that trade credits can alleviate financial constraints arising from asymmetric information...

This paper discusses the current state of and issues related to corporate governance in America after the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. It suggests additional steps necessary to realize improvement in the ways in corporations govern themselves and regulators must operate to make the...

Rajan and Zingales (1998) use U.S. Compustat firm data for the 1980s to obtain measures of manufacturing sectors? Dependence on External Finance (DEF). They take any differences in these measures to be structural/technological and thus applicable to other countries. Their joint assumptions about...

This paper shows that open market block trading can provide a link between private benefits of control enjoyed by large shareholders and the ?voting premium?, i.e. the price difference between voting and non-voting shares. We first demonstrate in a microstructure model with informed traders and...

Instrumente der Außenfinanzierung werden üblicherweise in Eigenkapital und Fremdkapital unterteilt. Die in der Finanzwirtschaft entwickelten Abgrenzungsmerkmale führen zu einer guten Charaktesierung verschiedener Finanzierungsinstrumente. Die Wahl des Merkmals "Rechststellung im Konkurs" als...

This paper identifies the entrepreneur's exposure to idiosyncratic risk as an important determinant of the capital structure of private companies. The exposure to idiosyncratic risk is approximated by the share of personal net worth invested in one company (SNWI). Exposure to idiosyncratic risk...

In this paper we suggest an structural model that specifies firm growth as a function of firm specific parameters and of competition for purchase power with other firms on a given market. Moreover, we explicitely model firms? innovative behaviour and distinguish between dierent innovation...