The financial crisis drew attention to the way in which workers in certain countries had been able to sustain consumption through housing and consumer credit despite insecure labour-market positions. This indicates a need to expand the analysis of the relationship between flexibility and...

Judicial enforcement of contracts can have an effect on credit market performance because it influences the risk and costs of credit transactions. This paper documents this point by empirically investigating the relation between the efficiency of judicial systems and credit market development...

Most economic investigations of access to education treat an investment in college or university as if it were a financial investment offering a particular expected rate of return. Since the average measured rates of return are quite favourable, other factors such as lack of information,...

The paper takes advantage of exceptionally rich longitudinal data on the universe of labor force participants in Slovenia and simulates the working of an income contingent loan scheme to partly recover tuition costs. The simulations show that under the base variant (where the target cost...

This paper analyzes optimal incentive compatible debt contracts when lenders are risk averse. The decisive factor in this regard is that risk aversion requiresto consider further sources of risk the lenders are exposed to. The main resultsderived in a setting of asymmetric information – the...

This paper studies optimal risk-taking and information disclosure by firms that obtain financing from both a 'relationship' bank and 'arm's-length' banks. We find that firm decisions are asymmetrically influenced by the degree of heterogeneity among banks: lowly-collateralized firms vary optimal...

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 process....

This paper uses an overlapping generations framework to analyze the implications of different financing regimes in the education sector for human capital formation and economic welfare. Agents privately invest in education after they have received a noisy information signal about their...

This paper analyses the relations between the banking system fluctuations, on one hand, and taxation and public spending, on the other one, using a VECM methodology. We find some evidence of prociclicality of fiscal policy using variables such as government spending, taxes, and primary surplus....

This brief exposition suggests that the Federal Reserve System temporarily guarantee a lower bound on stock prices in order to escape the current combination of liquidity trap and credit crunch. It shortly discusses reasons for this measure, consequences, and some alternatives. It is meant as a...