German unifikation hit the West German economy in a prosperous and appeared as a huge demand shock at least for the first few quarters. This combination resulted in a major increase of imports from the main trading partners of West Germany, which may have helped to cushion recessionary trends...

This study examines managerial disciplining in poorly performing firms using large panels for Belgian, French, German and UK firms. We consider the monitoring role of large blockholders, the market for share blocks, creditors, and non-executive directors. Board restructuring is correlated to...

This paper presents and compares several time-series models for returns of broadbased stock indices. These models nest a nonlinear asymmetric GARCH (NGARCH) model as a special case. Some of these models are empirically motivated ad-hoc specifications others are derived from a representative...

This paper examines return predictability when the investor is uncertain about the right state variables. A novel feature of the model averaging approach used in this paper is to account for finite-sample bias of the coefficients in the predictive regressions. Drawing on an extensive...

We estimate the degree of 'stickiness' in aggregate consumption growth (sometimes interpreted as reflecting consumption habits) for thirteen advanced economies. We find that, after controlling for measurement error, consumption growth has a high degree of autocorrelation, with a stickiness...

This paper studies the impact of process and product innovations introduced by firms on employment growth in these firms. A simple model that relates employment growth to process innovations and to the growth of sales separately due to innovative and unchanged products is developed and estimated...

In this paper an index of financial competitiveness is calculated that corresponds to the market-to-book ratio of inward FDI stocks. For a panel of five advanced economies from 1980 to 2006 it is shown that price competitiveness, stable inflation rates and registered patents have a positive...

Most previous research on efficiency in banking takes a regulatory perspective. In contrast, this paper investigates the empirical relation between efficiency and profitability in five large economies of the European Union during the period 1998-2005 and discusses the results from the...

In this paper, we present the basic ideas, the design and some key results of an ongoing research project on the transformation of the national political space in Western Europe. We start from the assumption that the current process of globalization or denationaliza-tion leads to the formation...