In this paper, we employ a registry of legal insider trading for Dutch listed firms to investigate the information content of trades by corporate insiders. Using a standard event-study methodology, we examine short-term stock price behavior around trades. We find that purchases are followed by...

This paper examines the relation between cash-flow availability and investment spending in the Netherlands. In particular, we are interested whether managerial discretion and/or asymmetric information underpin the positive relation between cash-flow and investment spending. This relation is...

Since 1990, London’s SEAQ International attracts considerable trading volume in Belgian equities. This paper uses transaction, quotation and limit order book data to investigate competition between the Brussels CATS market and SEAQ International. It focuses in more detail on the liquidity...

A quality improvement often necessitates modifications of varietal product features. This paper studies firms’ incentives to provide quality when this decision affects the goods’ degree of horizontal differentiation. Intuitively, one is inclined to argue that private incentives to provide...

How do banks react to increased interbank competition? Recent banking theory offers conflicting predictions about the impact of competition on bank orientation - i.e., the choice of relationship based versus transactional banking - and bank industry specialization. We empirically investigate the...

This paper studies the impact of bank mergers on firm-bank lending relationships using information from individual loan contracts in Belgium. We analyze the effects of bank mergers on the probability of borrowers maintaining their lending relationships and on their ability to continue tapping...

We propose a heteroscedastic regression model to identify the determinants of the dispersion in interest rates on loans granted to small and medium sized enterprises. We interpret unexplained deviations as evidence of the banks’ discretionary use of market power in the loan rate setting...

We present a dynamic microstructure model where a dealer market (DM) and a crossing network (CN) interact. We consider sequentially arriving agents having different valuations for an asset. Agents maximize their profits by either trading at a DM or by submitting an order for (possibly) uncertain...

Using a novel way to identify relationship and transaction banks, we study how banks’ lending techniques affect funding to SMEs over the business cycle. For 21 countries we link the lending techniques that banks use in the direct vicinity of firms to these firms’ credit constraints at two...