The economy of the European Union has not recovered from the impact of the economic and financial crisis. Growth rates remain low and investment activity is weak. This questions current economic policies of the Economic and Monetary Union, known as austerity. In opposition to fiscal contraction...

Innovativen Wachstumsunternehmen steht mit dem Crowdinvesting in Deutschland seit 2011 eine neuartige Finanzierungsmethode zur Verfügung. Hierbei versuchen die meist jungen Unternehmen durch einen gezielten öffentlichen Aufruf eine breite Masse privater Investoren anzusprechen. Basierend auf...

The real estate investment trust (REIT) industry experienced a liquidity crisis resulting from reduced access to credit commitments as banks were restoring their balance sheets during the 2007-2009 financial crisis. Employing generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH)...

This study investigates the legitimacy of the relatively high interest rates charged by those microfinance institutions (MFIs) which have been transformed into regulated commercial banks using information garnered from a panel of 1232 MFIs from 107 developing countries. Results show that...

Short sellers are perceived as informed, sophisticated investors. Yet little is known about their actual performance and trading strategies. Using a novel, hand-collected data set of daily position disclosures in Europe, we identify the entry, change, and exit dates of large short-sale positions...

Using fund-, firm- and bank-level data we investigate the investments of private equity (PE) funds in the north-western regions of Italy. Both the private equity fund managers and the PE investments are heavily concentrated in this most developed area of the country. The average size of the...

I revisit the Diamond-Dybvig model of liquidity insurance in the presence of hidden trades. The key result is that in this environment deposit-taking banks are not necessary for the efficient provision of liquidity. Mutual funds are constrained efficient when supplemented with the same...

I analyze welfare properties of mutual funds in the Diamond-Dybvig model with two sources of aggregate risk: undiversifiable interest rate risk and shocks to aggregate liquidity demand. Mutual funds are inefficient when the economy faces undiversifiable interest rate risk. However, if only...

This paper focuses on the comparison of financial performance of the Czech voluntary private pension scheme with five other reformed private pension schemes in the region of Central Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Slovak Republic). The current state and the recent...

This paper gives a reassessment of the sustainability of the reformed Hungarian pension system with a special focus on whether the introduction of the fully funded pillar in 1998 has led to any improvement in the sustainability of the pension system. After a brief description of the 1997/1998...