Does affiliation with a business group enhance a firm's performance? What is the potential effect of this affiliation especially in declining economic periods? The literature provides contradictory results on this proposition. In this study, the authors explore the role of business group...

This paper examines the impact of foreign and domestic acquisitions on firm-level financial risk in Italy and Spain over the period 2002-2010. Our results indicate that foreign acquisition leads to a significant and steady reduction in financial risk. In contrast, the domestic acquisition...

Consisting of teams working with firm level data, the International Study Group on Exports and Productivity has used comparable micro level panel data for 14 countries and a set of identically specified empirical models to investigate the relationship between exports and productivity. The...

This paper examines whether partisan politics and opportunistic government behavior generate political cycles in a small open economy, and, if so, whether such effects survive under increased economic integration. We discuss evidence drawn from Cyprus for the period 1978-2006. The empirical...

This paper investigates the presence of political budget cycles (PBCs) in the European Union using a data set encompassing all 27 current member states over the period 1997-2008, and analyzes what may explain their variability across countries and over time. Conditioning on partisan...