Finance is a vital ingredient for economic growth, but there can also be too much of it. This study investigates what fifty years of data for OECD countries have to say about the role of the financial sector for economic growth and income inequality and draws policy implications. Over the past...

This paper shows that finance has been a key ingredient of long-term economic growth in OECD and G20 countries over the past half-century, but that there can be too much finance. The evidence indicates that at current levels of household and business credit further expansion slows rather than...

This paper provides empirical evidence that campaign contributions arestrongly associated with market expectations of future firm-specific political favors,including preferential access to external financing. Using a novel dataset, we find thatfirms in Brazil providing contributions in the 1998...

Nach der Finanz-, Wirtschafts- und Verschuldungskrise sind erhebliche Regulierungsanstrengungen unternommen worden, um die Finanzmärkte robust zu machen. Nicht alle sind zielführend. So lässt sich beispielsweise der einheitliche Abwicklungsmechanismus (SRM) und die Abwicklungsrichtlinie...

Theory can have profound effects on practice, some intended and desirable, others unintended and undesirable. That's the story of the influence the field of law and economics has had on the domain of law and accounting. That influence comes primarily from agency theory and modern finance theory,...

In this paper I test for and model volatility jumps for the General Index (GD) of the Athens Stock Exchange (ASE), expanding the previous literature on the ASE in various ways. Using intraday data I first construct various state-of-the-art realized volatility estimators which I then use in...

This study aims to investigate how firm, industry, macroeconomic and institutional factors influence a firm's debt maturity structure decisions across nine African countries. We consider a sample of 986 non-financial firms over a period of 10 years (1999-2008). We specify panel data models that...

The aim of this study is to empirically investigate the role of firm- industry-, institutional-, and macroeconomic-factors on a firm's capital structure decision in the context of nine African countries. To this end, we consider a sample of 986 non-financial firms over a period of 10 years...

Securitisation issuance has slumped in recent years, with the market having become increasingly dependent on central bank and government support in both Europe and the United States. Despite facing a number of threats that could inhibit a recovery in the shorter term, the securitisation market...

We have studied statistical characteristics of five share price time series. For each stock price, we estimated a best fit quantitative model for the monthly closing price as based on the decomposition into two defining consumer price indices selected from a large set of CPIs. It was found that...