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Risk Attitudes and Private Business Equity

Differential Taxation and Firms' Financial Leverage: Evidence from the Introduction of a Flat Tax on Interest Income

Tax competition for the mobile factor capital has led to a trend in many countries to levy lower taxes on interest income, often introducing differential taxation between interest and business income. In this study, we analyze the effect of such differential taxation on the debt ratio of firms. We exploit a 2009 tax reform in Germany as a quasi-experiment, which introduced a flat final withholding ...

Liquidity Risk, Credit Risk and the Overnight Interest Rate Spread: A Stochastic Volatility Modelling Approach

In this paper we model the volatility of the spread between the overnight interest rate and the central bank policy rate (the policy spread) for the euro area and the UK during the two main phases of the financial crisis that began in late 2007. During the crisis, the policy spread exhibited signs of volatility, owing to the breakdown in interbank market activity. The determinants of this volatility ...

Smart Capital in German Start-ups: An Empirical Analysis

What kind of smart capital relational investors actually supply, especially in a bank-based financial system such as the German one, is still an open question. We divide smart capital into single components and conduct a survey with 85 German suppliers of start-up finance. The results show that the degree of 'smartness' is determined by the financial product used and partly also by the financiers' ...

Is Government Ownership of Banks Really Harmful to Growth?

We put forward a modern version of the 'developmental' view of government-owned banks which shows that the combination of information asymmetries and weak institutions creates scope for such banks to play a growth-promoting role. We present new cross-country evidence consistent with our theoretical predictions. Specifically, we show that during 1995-2007 government ownership of banks has been robustly ...

Fractional Cointegration in US Term Spreads

This note examines the stochastic properties of US term spreads with parametric and semi-parametric fractional integration techniques. Since the observed data (rather than the estimated residuals from a cointegrating regression) are used for the analysis, standard methods can be applied. The results indicate that US Treasury maturity rates are I(1) in most cases, although the order of integration decreases ...

Germany's Slump Explaining the Unemployment Crisis of the 1990s

According to a widespread view, Germany's unemployment crisis is caused by rigid labour markets, low profitability and increasing international competition. We argue that this view does not provide a convincing explanation for the dramatic rise in Germany's unemployment rate since 1989, first because no distinction is drawn between the situation in the Eastern part of Germany and that in the Western ...

The Impact of Real Oil Price on Real Effective Exchange Rate: The Case of Azerbaijan

Using quarterly data from 2000-2007 and applying Error Correction Model and Johansen Co-integration Approaches I estimate the impact of real oil price on the real exchange rate of Azerbaijani manat. Estimation outputs derived from these approaches are very close to each other and indicate that real oil price has statistically significant positive impact on real exchange rate in the long-run. Besides, ...

The Euro Area Crisis Management Framework: Consequences and Institutional Follow-Ups

The current instruments in the EU to deal with debt and liquidity crises include among others the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) and the European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism (EFSM). Both are temporary in nature (3 years). In terms of an efficient future crisis management framework one has to ask what follows after the EFSF and the EFSM expire in 3 years time. In this vein, this ...

How Much Fiscal Backing Must the ECB Have? The Euro Area Is Not the Philippines

The ECB has accepted increasing amounts of rubbish collateral since the crisis started leading to exposure to serious private sector credit risk (i.e. default risk) on its collateralised lending and reverse operations ("repo"). This has led some commentators to argue that the ECB needs "fiscal back-up" to cover any potential losses to be able to continue pursuing price stability. This Brief argues ...