This paper uses micro data from four OECD countries (the United States, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands), to assess the determinants of household debt holding and to investigate whether or not credit constraints are important for household debt holding. We extend the existing literature in...

Strategic investors, such as corporate venture capitalists, engage in the financing of start-up firms to complement their core businesses and to facilitate the internalization of externalities. We argue that while strategic objectives make it more worthwhile for an investor to elicit high...

A number of heterogeneous items are to be sold to a group of potential bidders. Every bidder knows his own values over the items and his own budget privately. Due to budget constraint, bidders may not be able to pay up to their values. In such a market, a Walrasian equilibrium usually fails to...

In the analysis of the credit crisis of 2007-2010 a clear distinction should be made between (i) the initial shock; (ii) the propagation and amplification of the initial shock to the systemic crisis of the financial markets; and (iii) the transmission of the credit crisis to the real economic...

We investigate the cyclicality of the private savings to GDP ratio for a panel of 19 OECD countries over the period 1971-2009. We find robust evidence that the private savings ratio is countercyclical. Three theories unambiguously predict a higher private savings ratio during recessions: a...

Financial frictions are a central element of most of the models that the literature on emerging markets crises has proposed for explaining the Sudden Stop phenomenon. To date, few studies have aimed to examine the quantitative implications of these models and to integrate them with an...

This paper summarizes and discusses new evidence on the nature, extent, evolution and consequences of financing constraints in Latin America; this evidence is drawn from a recent series of papers. The countries covered are Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, and Uruguay. All the new...

The paper investigates whether liquidity constraints affect firm size and growth dynamics using a large longitudinal sample of Italian manufacturing firms. We run standard panel-data Gibrat regressions, suitably expanded to take into account liquidity constraints (proxied by cash flow scaled by...

Debt-to-GDP ratios have grown to unprecedented levels in many industrialized economies. This requires disciplined consolidation efforts which are, however, supposed to come now at the wrong time with the economic recovery being fragile. The countries forming the G20 need to make sure the...

Die Schuldenstände sind in vielen Industrieländern auf Rekordhöhen angestiegen. Dies erfordert disziplinierte Konsolidierungsanstrengungen, die im derzeitigen wirtschaftlichen Umfeld allerdings zu einem vermeintlich ungünstigen Zeitpunkt kommen. Die G20-Länder sind aufgefordert, die...